Grano, the wildly popular Italian restaurant on Dublin’s northside, is many wonderful things but it is definitely not big, and it quickly becomes clear that it’s going to struggle to accommodate two people from The Irish Times standing around like eejits during dinner service.

While it is not yet 7pm, things are getting busy – and by standing in all the wrong places at all the wrong times, we’re getting in the way. So we retreat to the shadows to watch.

The kitchen, where three chefs are working quickly but calmly to produce some of the most authentic Italian food west of the European boot, is not much bigger than what you might find in a typical Irish three-bed semi, while the restaurant floor, with space for 40 diners, is no bigger than many Irish sittingrooms.

Its size, of course, is part of its charm, because what is rare is beautiful. Free tables in Grano are rare indeed.

The front-of-house staff and the kitchen staff weave around each other effortlessly (at least until The Irish Times breaks their rhythm) and plates move swiftly from the pass to simple wooden tables. Elenice Parente is quietly rolling pasta into thin tubes that will soon make their way on to those plates. The space the Brazilian lawyer-turned-pasta-maker is using could have been given over to another table to generate extra revenue, but her presence on the restaurant floor reminds diners that fresh pasta rolled before their eyes is central to the Grano mission. It all plays out to a soundtrack of gentle laughter and quiet jazz. It is all so mellow and gorgeous.

But all that gorgeousness takes planning.

At 10am the engine that powers Grano starts purring with just three people in the kitchen – the owner Roberto Mungo, the chef Francesco Chiodi and the pasta man Giovanni Mannino.

They talk quietly in Italian as they go about their business, prepping the fillings for the ravioli and setting up the sauces that will be central to tonight’s short and focused menu.

But by that time, one member of staff working next door in A Fianco, the wine bar Mungo opened three years after Grano in 2022, is already nearly halfway through his shift