The accepted wisdom of restaurant hunting in the Med is to avoid the picturesque waterside places offering dodgy overpriced food to tourists who wouldn't know a bisque from a biscuit, and instead seek out that obscure little place in the old town where locals eat perfectly cooked meals for a fraction of the price.

Fine if the food is your top priority; not so fine if what you really want to do is have lunch in the salt air, with water lapping at your feet, watching boats and beautiful people glide by. If the food's not up to Michelin star standard, does it really matter?

When we went to the fabulous Mahón harbour this summer with the Balearics Rally fleet, we asked those who knew the town to recommend a restaurant. The Marivent, they all said, for its sophisticated, fairly expensive cuisine, or the Roma for its consistently good food at reasonable prices. Strangely though, that lunchtime they all turned up in La Minerva. Like us, they just couldn't resist the pleasure of arriving by tender at this inviting-looking place, its blue-and-white awnings fluttering in the gentle breeze, promising shade from the baking lunchtime sun. With its boardwalk floor and blue-and-white painted woodwork it would have a nautical feel even were it not for the fact that it is very obviously floating.

Could this be a wonderful location with good food as well? We'd soon find out after grabbing a table right at the front, where we could look at the water, and the comings and goings of customers in their tenders.

All the food is prepared in the main restaurant building on the other side of the road, and is carried across by nimble waiters who are expert at balancing dishes while dodging cars. (But a friend told us he'd been there one day when a moped wrong-footed a waiter and sent two freshly cooked lobsters flying through the air.)

The menu is long and varied with the emphasis on fish. To start Amanda chose lobster vichyssoise - a delicious, velvety chilled soup, which inexplicably came with a plate of crisply fried squid and pieces of fish. I wish I had ordered the vichyssoise as my starter was disappointing: it was billed as chef's salad of special lettuce, which turned out to be boring old little gem with blue cheese sauce. My friends' salad starters were much more interesting - Lester's combined tomato, olives, lettuce and the local Mahón cheese, and Jessica's was a tasty combination of prawns, palm hearts, avocado, black olives and radiccio.

Fortified with vitamins, we embarked on our main courses. Jessica and I chose a special of the day - grouper in slices of garlic with an oil and vinegar sauce, accompanied by a baked pepper stuffed with a wonderfully aromatic ratatouille. The fish was aptly described by Jessica as "lovely, firm and succulent", and the sweet roasted garlic was an excellent accompaniment.

Amanda chose ostrich, which tasted like tender steak, served with a sweet sauce with a hint of sherry. Amanda thought it would be nice with mashed potato, but wasn't grumbling about her pommes dauphinoise. "Easily the nicest meal I've had in Spain," she said.

Lester ordered pollo asado en su jugo (roast chicken and gravy), which he pronounced as "very flavoursome".

For pudding we tasted the local specialities, the best being my borrachitos al gin de Menorca - tiny Madeira-like cakes soaked in Menorcan gin, with a strawberry coulis and a spoonful of sorbet.

Amanda picked Menorcan cheese ice-cream: firm-textured with a crème-brûlée-style crisp caramel topping.

With one bottle of delicious vino de la casa between us - great value at just £3.40 - the bill came to only £16 per head, including a stunning view of Isla Pinto, and the fun of watching those who'd had more than one bottle of vino teetering and wobbling in their rubber dinghies.