It had been a while. Without wanting to sound like a total dinosaur, it's been a number of years since Captain A's featured regularly on my dining agenda. It was not always thus. Back in the day I was a good customer of the Captain, as were many of my fellow Trinity students. We did not, it has to be said, have many options. There was Solomon Grundy's. There was Murph's – the Suffolk Street branch was dead handy. There was Kilkenny Design. Bewley's. Switzers' Café. The Coffee Inn. And there was the – often preferred – option of not eating at all and getting our calories in liquid form. No change there so.

Captain A's repaid our custom by being a loyal advertiser in Piranha, a satirical college magazine in which I was involved selling advertising. In fact ? I think it's the moment to confess ? I was also one of the anonymous contributors to the publication's vicious and much-anticipated gossip column, The Sybarite, writing scurrilous and often entirely untrue stories about the libidinous exploits of other students. Piranha is still going strong, some cough cough years, later ? to the extent that it was recently carpeted by the Junior Dean in charge of discipline for publishing a guide to the staging of a Columbine-style attack on the campus. But I digress.

On a Saturday afternoon in early January we piled in famished after an afternoon on the rollercoasters at Funderland (boys) and scavenging around the floor of Topshop for bargains (girls). We hadn't booked and were lucky to get a table, which we were told – charmingly ? that we'd have to give back two hours later. The place was hopping, full of the kind of punters that somehow you never seem to see in other restaurants. The waiters are a tad older and more relaxed than elsewhere, the walls are covered with music and Oirish memorabilia from all the usual suspects, and even the music video channel playing doesn't appear to feature anything from the current century. There is something quite comforting about the time-warp effect of all this.

Anyone who makes a habit of eating at Captain A's has a regular order. My sister-in-law still goes a couple of times a year on a nostalgia trip with two old college friends. They've been ordering the same burgers (Southwestern for Mairead, Barbeque for Rita, Mushroom for Catherine) for nigh on 30 years. I seem to remember a brief flirtation with organic a few years back but that seems to have been abandoned in favour of a return to a menu that has remained almost unchanged since Captain A's first opened its doors in 1971. I know this because, helpfully, copies of old menus are displayed on the walls on the way up to the loos. My standard order used to be the Deluxe (lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion and mayonnaise) – partly I think because we only ever had salad cream at home and the dollop of Hellman's seemed terrifically exotic. This time I had the Cheese Deluxe (€13.45), with a sliced of melted Monterey Jack. The burger was a bit on the grey side – not much evidence of a char-grill in the kitchen here – but I was hungry and it did the job. The others liked their Ribs (€16.95), Chilli con Carne (€12.75) and various burgers well enough. Fries were good and sides of onion rings popular. With a few shared puddings (look away, dieters, but the Snickers Almondy (€6.25) and Cookie Sundae (€6.25) are both rib-stickingly, detox-defyingly delicious) and plenty of soft drinks, the bill came to €170.85 for eight of us, including 10% service. This is white trash eating, for people with low budgets and big appetites. Captain A's is not, in fairness, trying to compete with the more exotic offerings at JoBurger or Real Gourmet Burger. My niece Ruth tells me that it's still very popular with students, particularly early in the week when cocktails are €3 a pop.

Captain America's

44 Grafton Street, Dublin 2

Tel: 01 6715 266

Rating: 3/5