The perfect Sicilian job

Ed eats

Ristorante Don Serafino 1953
Dragonara Casino, St Julian’s
Tel: 2137 7719

Food: 8/10
Service: 9/10
Ambience: 10/10
Value: 7/10
Average: 8/10

Man is, by and large, a creature of habit. We do break our routine occasionally, and this is where innovation usually happens, but we tend to settle back into the habits we’reused to.

Taking this in evolutionary terms, we can attribute our behaviour to our forefathers who settled in a particular place as long as natural resources lasted.

Then when food became scarce or environmental conditions worsened, our ancestors upped and left to venture to more bountiful or safer locations. And there they settled again for a while.

I suppose that our current living conditions make this routine largely redundant, however we are little more than apes who have learned how to tell stories (and quite a few people I know are living testament to this), so we love to settle into a comfortable state of affairs unless prodded too hard.

I’m surprised at how often I suggest something new to someone who refuses the novelty on the grounds that it is something they haven’t done before. That is the point of the word ‘new’.

Brave is the man, then, who takes what he knows to be excellent and attempts to replicate the formula elsewhere. Two men in this case. Antonio and Giuseppe La Rosa, owners of the fabled and Michelin starred La Locanda di Don Serafino in Ragusa, Sicily, have recently opened a restaurant in Maltabearing the same name.

The location they picked is the site of the erstwhile brasserie at the Dragonara Casino and the chef, Claudio Schiavone, was sous-chef at their Ragusan restaurant.

Having shipped both the name of the restaurant and a cornerstone of the kitchen there from one island to another was an indication, at least to my optimistic take on the news, that they seriously intend to sweep us off our feet in the same way as they have done repeatedly with their flagship in Sicily.

Now I have been subject to lectures on the paucity of our culinary culture by Sicilians before, proud advocates of their own kitchen who regard ours to be casual, even philistine, in its approach to preparation and consumption.

And while my experiences have given me the occasional reason to agree with them, while the sticky, grey stew of food programmes on local TV contributes hugely to this notion, while some of the more awful of ‘Maltese’ cookbooks peddled to tourists drives the grease-laden skewer even deeper, we have plenty to be proud of.

It was with a much more accepting attitude that I headed for Don Serafino, accompanied by two women who know more about food than they are prepared to admit. One of them was Maltese and the other Italian, both fiercely proud of their own kitchens. The night was going to be fun.

We were greeted by Giuseppe La Rosa himself and shown to our table on the terrace. The restaurant is smart. Everything about the place has been carefully and deliberately designed to look simultaneously smart and welcoming.

From the starched, white table linen to displays of Ragusan speciality chocolates at the bar, there is nothing that has been left to chance. And yet Giuseppe is apologetic, almost contrite about us having to experience their service during their first week on foreign shores.

The menu is interesting although nowhere near as innovative as their Ragusan one. I would try to explore a new market before hitting them with my more inventive recipes, and I suppose this is what might be going on here.

We start with a trio of raw seafood – an elegant and delicately seasoned Barracuda tartare, an imaginative approach to prawn carpaccio, the raw flesh wrapped around a lightly spiced ball of couscous, and a rather average tuna carpaccio.

We were being served by a young, Sicilian man who, seemingly unaffected by the uprooting, laid on the Sicilian accent and charm in such a disarming way that we all suddenly felt like we’d been there a hundred times before.

This man knows the art of restaurant service and does not hesitate to use its finer points. He recommended a Tenuta Terre Nere rosato from Etna and we found it to be dry as a bone, with an equally restrained, mineral nose and finish.

It took me a while to agree with his recommendation but when I came round to it I could see why he had picked the austere rosato with our carpaccio.

Next up was a Ragusan speciality, a rotolino di fegato that seemed to be entirely made of rabbit meat wrapped around rabbit liver and served in cold slices. The result is extremely tender and the unctuous filling fared as well with the rosato as the fish had. It was a bit bland though, and felt like it missed that final ingredient that would have helped buoy the naturally delicate flavour of lean rabbit flesh.

Before we made it to the main course, an intermediate dish of tagliolini ai crostacei helped bridge the gap. The tagliolini were simply superb, making us promise to ourselves that we would never, ever buy the store-bought equivalent again. The prawn and langoustine had, unfortunately, been decidedly overdone for our liking and had left little influence on the sauce itself.

Our main course came in the form of seared tuna with a bell pepper ‘caponata’ that had, with the assistance of onion, developed into an intense and almost sweet flavour to it.

The tuna had been, at our request, served as rare as it could have been and had been seared on the outside to leave a firm, red centre. I loved the sharp contrast the sweet peppers provided to the almost brash intensity of the tuna and was also quite surprised at how well they behaved when faced with the intense spice and floral notes of a bottle of 2009 Vivera Martinella.

Also from Etna, this Sicilian red has a mineral, almost sulphurous palate that persists through to its reasonably sustained finish.

We ended the meal with a devilishly creamy parfait di mandorle, with crunchy bits of crushed almond punctuating the intensely sweet backdrop of this Sicilian signature dessert.

When we were done we got to meet Claudio, the man who had orchestrated all of this for us in the kitchen. He is humble to a fault, apologetic like Giuseppe had been, and lights up when we mention one of his creations.

He had done all that despite the teething troubles of the kitchen and working in an unfamiliar environment. He has sourced the majority of his ingredients from Sicily, relying on the local market for fresh fish and other ingredients that must be bought daily.

He is also full of ideas, almost literally bubbling with enthusiasm to bring new ideas to the table and bring the full Ragusan experience to Malta.

Mostly, I suspected, he can’t wait to settle into his new kitchen and get all the logistics of a new restaurant out of the way.

Man is, by and large, a creature of habit. Some do break their routine occasionally, and this leads to great things – like Don Serafino moving out of its hometown of Ragusa to bring some of their kitchen to our shores.

And I’m sure that youngClaudio has a lot of innovation left in his sharp and creative mind to keep us going back for more.

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