`Lord Sieff is in the kitchen tonight'

IN Debrett's predictably pompous New Guide to Etiquette & Modern Manners published this week, the author John Morgan rather sniffily refers to the practice of "metropolitan singles" serving pre-prepared food at their dinner parties.

If your idea of cooking involves several foil packages and a microwave, it is apparently good manners to warn your guests with the expression "Lord Sieff is in the kitchen tonight". According to Mr Morgan they will immediately understand that you are referring to the one-time chairman of Marks & Spencer and will adjust their culinary expectations accordingly.

Unfortunately for the non-Darina types among us, it means that their expectations will rocket - and with ever increasing reason. The good news is the new M & S, which opened yesterday, has a vast new supermarket-style food hall in the basement. Wide aisles, loose fruit: and vegetables and a cash point at the checkouts (for those shoppers who lose the run of themselves) are major addition, but most goodies will be familiar to northsiders used to the large Mary Street branch of the store.

There are a few tempting new ranges on the shelves which should find their way on to Dublin's dinner party menus including Chicken Panzerotti, Tagliolini Verdi Gratnati, or for the more adventurous, Prawn Balti with nan bread. To complete the picture of a one-stop dinner-party shop the wine section has been greatly expanded and there's a horticulture shop where hosts can stock up on a colour coordinated floral centrepiece.

Knowing that M & S food is such a major draw, the store is laid out so that the escalators going down to the basement are near enough to the door so that shoppers can descend into pre-packed bliss with barely a glimpse of a Shetland sweater or a lambs-wool two-piece.

The bad news is that the store which seems to take up half of Grafton Street, looks so determinedly ordinary inside. Beige walls, a beige and brown mottled carpet and extremely dull displays are dreary enough, but the effect is made all the worse by the cruel fluorescent lighting beaming down unforgivingly from the first floor's oppressively low ceiling.

Up the road Habitat have to virtually employ people on crowd control duty, but M & S management has decided there's no room for an interiors section in the new super-store, and the children's clothes section is only a fraction of what is available in the Mary Street branch.