Feeding the imagination - Nigel's nibbles

This week, Nigel dines al fresco at Mangia Mare

Yes friends, this is your all-new STOM restaurant review. Yes I know there are others, but this will be the definitive guide to eating out in Malta and Gozo. Each week I'll review an eating-place and report on the ambiance, the food (naturally) and all the other little things that make or break a meal in a restaurant.

And I won't be doing what certain other restaurant reviewers (no names, no pack-drill) do, and that is to write nine-tenths of the review about everything under the sun... except the restaurant under scrutiny, then praise or dismiss the eatery in half-a-dozen well chosen words.

So, rest assured, this will be proper restaurant reviewing, where the bistro or café will take centre stage and not my ego. Not that I don't have an ego... haven't we all? But I'm certainly not going to let it get in the way of my objective weekly critiques. Oh no, I'm far too professional for that. These reviews are going to home in on food, good cooking and where to get it... OK?

You may have read my restaurant reviews before in this or that expensive, up-market glossy. My last stint was with that vastly overpriced epicurean tome: Sophistikation (So sophisticated they didn't even bother to spell it correctly). There I wrote my restaurant reviews under the header Nige's Nosh (frightfully posh). And now I'm going to regale the STOM with all my months of experience of eating out in some of the best restaurants in the centre of the universe... a.k.a. Malta and Gozo. It's going to concentrate solely on the restaurants and I'm going to leave the padding to lesser qualified quaffers and scoffers.

I mean... for heaven's sake, this is supposed to be about where to eat and where not to eat out in our islands, not some convoluted, opinionated load of tosh about anything and everything... except what I'm supposed to be writing about.

For instance, I'm certainly not going to head up my piece with the name of the restaurant under review and then not mention the bloody place again for 15 or 20 paragraphs. The pieces will be entitled Nigel's Nibbles (Nigel being my given name... as opposed to Borg Fenech, which is my surname... but you don't want to know about that) so you're going to get a comprehensive account of whichever eating-place I've selected for that particular week.

You cannot believe the tedium of having to wade through six and a half columns of waffle, to get to the two sentences of nitty-gritty at the end of the page. That's not restaurant reviewing, that's self-indulgent, self-serving, embarrassing twaddle.

Like the review I read last week in... it doesn't matter where. It happened to be written by a fat slapper that, to the best of my knowledge, has never even seen the inside of a restaurant kitchen, and can't tell Bearnaise from burnt toast. She spent nearly all the "review" banging on about her, obviously unsuccessful, attempt to sort out the feng shui in her downstairs bathroom.

Apparently the bidet and WC were out of sync with her Yin and Yang and throwing her bio-rhythms all to cock, causing her unprecedented irritation in the vicinity of her gall bladder. Now what on earth this had to do with the quality of the bragoli in the restaurant under review, God alone knows!

And that's just typical of the sort of restaurant review we're seeing more and more... I'm afraid.

Well, you won't be getting that from me. So if you're the sort of reader who thinks a restaurant review is supposed to spend most of its space talking about something... anything, alien to food and restaurants, don't bother to read mine. Cos I'm going to concentrate solely on the subject in-hand... eating out.

Oh, by the way, the Mangia Mare was crap... total crap!