Oh, to be like my friend who never worries about finding a parking space and always does, right outside where she wants to be. Even in the most appalling traffic she will weave her way through, fully confident that, when she arrives, someone will always be pulling out of a prime spot. They usually are too but, even if it's not a perfect space, she is so deft that she can turn on a sixpence and slot her car into the merest chink. Leaving her lots of time to put on lipstick and tidy her hair. Then there's the rest of us.
Typically, the other day I drove in frenzied circles around the Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge, cursing those chained-off and empty parking spaces beside the hotel and the huge delivery vans parked anyway they pleased. I knew there was a car park somewhere in the bowels of the earth, but couldn't find the entrance. Finally, it got so late that I gave up and parked on double yellow lines on a corner.
Feeling as though I had just been ground through a pepper mill, I made my way into the cool marble hotel foyer, where several young men and women in blue suits were directing people hither and thither. Could someone please rescue my car and put it in the car park, I asked but without much hope of satisfaction. "No problem," said Claire - and it was done, and for free! The blood pressure dropped a notch. Even if the food was going to be poison, I already loved the place.
I was meeting my father and three of his friends. They lunch together once a month and are always looking for new places to try out. They had planned to go somewhere that required a long bus journey since the youngest member of the group, George, had just got his free bus pass. But they were willing to give the hotel a try and, being absolute gentlemen, they had all showed up on the nail of 1 p.m. I found them in the bar sipping dry sherry, although this happy state hadn't been reached without difficulty. The young French barman didn't know his pale from his cream and had made a couple of false starts. In the end the they got what they wanted and declared him to be a decent fellow all the same.
Everywhere around us, people were tucking into interesting looking salads and open sandwiches but we were destined for the restaurant at the other end of the vast open space of the lobby. You can lunch in the lobby, too, and Sunday brunch there is popular, particularly with the residents of the flats next door.
The restaurant is a cut above most hotel dining rooms. No hushed tones or waiters in shabby black tie, flourishing menus festooned with tassels. It's a big, bright room, walls painted cobalt blue, pillars painted with cubist views of Mediterranean villages and an entire wall of windows overlooking Herbert Park. The windows pull back on warm days, so you can have your lunch on a verandah, sitting in Lloyd Loom chairs with big cream umbrellas overhead. It looks positively colonial. It must be wonderful to sit out there on a hot day.
No such luck for us. The day was cool, the sky overcast and, though there were tables set up on the verandah, nobody had ventured out.
One of the best things about the room is that is so big, like the rest of the hotel. What a marvellous squandering of space, planned, no doubt, before the property boom and not repeated since in any city hotel. There is enough room between the tables to slot in a small one-bedroom apartment - well, that's not quite true but there is enough space to allow conversations to be private and for people to push by with babies' buggies or wheelchairs without ramming chairs.
A couple with a tiny baby had wheeled in a big new-fangled buggy, while nearby was a big table of lunching ladies. Otherwise the clientele was mostly business male with the usual chirruping mobiles and the more flamboyant ones hopping through the sliding windows to get a better reception on the verandah.
The three-course lunch isn't particularly cheap at £18.50, but you can get your money's worth by lingering long into the afternoon. Certainly the ladies looked as though they were in no hurry and neither were we.
Although it's a set lunch the choice is good, with five starters and main courses - and several imaginative, not to mention huge, desserts. As there were so many of us, we could sample most of what is on the menu and it was consistently good.
Mushroom and leek soup was freshly made and came with a good stir-in of creme fraiche. The Boston prawn and asparagus salad had lots of both main ingredients, though the prawns looked pretty tiny. It was described as "nice and warm" and "very good".
Three types of very fresh bread came in satisfying doorsteps and there was plenty of butter. My brushcetta with char-grilled courgettes and mushrooms was really good - with just one slice of French bread, generously covered in a mix of tomatoes and olives with a skim of melted mozzarella on top and mushrooms and courgettes on the side.
My main course of ragout of baby vegetables had a Champneys look to it. There was no ragout as such, just a plate of beautifully arranged, quite naked steamed carrots, asparagus, sweetcorn and courgettes, sculpted into shapes and fanned out. It did come with a little bowl of red pepper sauce but, even with this all over, it couldn't have been more than 20 calories.
To my left Geoffrey had a plate of lamb's liver with smoked bacon. The liver was thickly cut and well cooked - "the way it should be - you'd be a fool to eat rare liver," he said.
There were two contenders for fillets of monkfish in a garlic cream. These smallish nuggets of fish, with a rich and fragrant sauce, arrived in a shallow soup dish. Why the bowl, they wanted to know. "Because you are so old you have to eat from a bowl," quipped their friend.
Seafood of the Day turned out to be mixture of salmon and monkfish, this time on a large plate but with a blanket of sauce and a bed of saffron rice.
After the vegetables, I was dying for something big and starchy, but made do with a plate of Irish and Continental Cheeses - four slices of cheese, a clump of grapes, some apple and loads of Carrs water biscuits. Lovely, if you had all afternoon to linger.
Raspberry parfait with a passion fruit coulis sounded good and healthy but turned out to be a formidable slice of raspberry ice cream, topped with a free-form affair in spun sugar with huge raspberries standing to attention all around the plate.
Even bigger was the slice of rich chocolate truffle cake served with coffee anglaise which was deemed too sweet to be real chocolate. The other two demurred, making do with a last glass of Chablis. Coffees came with a plate of petit fours - almond tuiles, tiny meringues held together with chocolate and little praline discs with hazelnuts.
There was very little to quibble about, apart from the mineral water which was almost warm. "Too many bubbles in it - gives you wind," was another comment.
The waiter had been very friendly and fast on his feet all through the meal but he hovered a bit at the reception desk while I was paying. As I fished around in my bag for a credit card, he spied a foreign note in an inner pocket and said "Oooh, what's that? Escudos! You've been down to Faro!" Elementary, but a bit fresh.
Lunch for five with two bottles of Chablis came to £145, without service.
The Herbert Park Hotel Restaurant, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 - phone (01) 6672200 Open seven days for breakfast and lunch Dinner Monday to Saturday.
