No such thing as a cheap vegetarian lunch?

We've Got Mail: Gerti Stephens from Kildare recently had Sunday lunch in the Dungeon Bar & Grill at Fitzpatrick's Killiney Castle Hotel, in Co Dublin and found the experience to be distinctly mixed. As a vegetarian with a dairy allergy, Stephens is accustomed to encountering difficulties finding "something tasty and suitable when eating out".

On this occasion, however, all seemed to be well and she was pleased to discover that she was able to order a bowl of plain fettuccine pasta and combine it with side dishes of mixed vegetables and sauteed mushrooms. "The quality of the food was good and I was satisfied with my meal," she writes. Then the bill arrived and it all started to go wrong. Although the fettuccine was unadorned she was charged the full price of €13.50 for a pasta dish and €4.50 for each of the side dishes, bringing her total bill to €22.50. She says that she queried the bill but other than being told that "we have to charge the full price for this" she got little in the way of comfort from staff at the hotel. "Even if I had been charged the price of a side dish for my bowl of plain pasta, the restaurant presumably would have made a nice profit. It is hard to believe that charging €22.50 in total for a meal of this kind could be allowed.

We called the restaurant in question to query the billing practice on our reader's behalf. A spokesman expressed surprise to get a complaint about pricing. We were told that since the Dungeon Grill opened three years ago it has been "exceptionally busy" and oneof the reasons for that, the spokesman said, was "how reasonable the prices are". He said that main courses range in price from €13.50 to €16.50. "People can't believe the value for money they are getting and we have never had a complaint about pricing before," he said. He accepted that restaurant staff would not, generally speaking, offer a discount if a diner opted to have a bowl of plain pasta.

He said that perhaps in this case it would have been better if staff had made an allowance and charged our reader for a single side dish instead of two. He said that if she contacted the hotel directly then it would be perfectly prepared to reach an "amicable solution".

A cry of despair

Every song might well be a cry for love, but the cost of voting for just one of them in last week's Eurovision brought a cry of despair from one reader. Reader Dermot McCauley points out Irish Eurovision fans were expected to pay five times more to register our votes than voters in Germany and almost double what those in Britain were charged. The German TV station ARD was charging voters just 12 cent, while in Britain votes registered via the BBC cost 25 pence or 37 cent. Irish voters had to pay 60 cent. We contacted Phonovation, the company that managed the voting for RTÉ, and were told that the EU-wide tariffs were decided from a central location in Germany and Phonovation had no say in setting the costs.

Too ready for rip-off

Last week we published an item from a reader who had been forced to ring Ryanair's premium rate phone line in search of a confirmation number for two flights he had booked after a problem with his printer meant he couldn't print out his details. Well, fare is fare and we are happy to report that a second reader got in touch after he had an entirely different experience dealing with the airline when his own conformation number went astray. "Your correspondent should probably not have just assumed that he was going to be ripped off," Paul Sheridan writes.

"Recently a confirmation email from a Ryanair booking I made got stopped by our work e-mail system and so I phoned up the regular bookings line (local charge) and they gave me the reference with no trouble and with much courtesy."

Watch the prices grow

A Dublin-based reader keen to do a spot of gardening was astonished at the price differences for the same products in major DIY outlets. A one kilo bag of Bio Slug Pellets, she says, cost €4.99 in a Homebase outlet in Nutgrove in Rathfarnham but €8.99 in Atlantic Homecare in Stillorgan. It was a case of swings and roundabouts however because she also needed some Westland soil useful for growing Camellias and Rhododendrons. A 20-litre bag in Homebase €4.49 but double that amount was selling in Atlantic Homecare for just 50 cent more.