The parking conundrum

Ed eats

Café Sicilia
25 Tigné Seafront,
Sliema
Tel: 2133 9404

Food: 7/10
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 8/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 7/10

I’m not overly enthralled when someone suggests lunch at a café in Sliema. I’m not particularly thrilled when the call saying, “We’re ready to leave home”, coincides with the strike of two. By that time I’m normally fed and very busy planning my next meal.

But then a meal is about much more than the ingredients on my plate. I could be eating the magnum opus of a three-starred chef while conveying terrible news to the person sitting in front of me and the food will taste of burnt meat and Bisto.

So lunch at a café in Sliema, with the right people, on a glorious if exceedingly hot afternoon, suddenly becomes much more appealing than if it were just about the menu.

Because this sort of meal is what social networking is all about. ‘Social networks’ is another phrase that we’ve all but lost to a new meaning – that of the hundreds of ways we have at our disposal to get in touch with people without ever meeting them.

Google has, for the fourth time, made its own attempt this month. It is rolling out its confusingly-named Google+ that so far feels like a diet version of Facebook with a bit of Twitter thrown in.

I’m sure it has worked out the right formula this time and now I have yet another stream of information to contend with.

Being out to lunch, I’m free from a screen and stripped of the ability to choose whom I want to talk to and how I want to phrase my next sentence before actually typing it out. It will be a very scary world to live in when this becomes a circumstance we choose to avoid.

If you’re reading this online because you can’t be bothered to get out of bed on a Sunday, buy the papers and meet real people, then you might need to carefully consider getting some of your life back.

As you might have gathered, we sat to lunch at around half past two. Parking in Sliema isn’t as easy as it was 70 years ago. I wasn’t around then but I cannot imagine that it has been easy any time after that.

There is an ineffable mathematical conundrum that dictates that there are always more people who want to be in Sliema than there are people in Sliema who want to get out of it. Until some bright boffin works this out, we’re destined to parking woes.

The spot chosen was Café Sicilia, one of the many indistinguishable cafés that serve food of varyingquality and complexity throughout the day.

The menu board is what gives this particular place away. Alici marinati, linguine allo scoglio al cartoccio, fettuccine gamberoni e pistacchio, and seven different fresh fish are listed as specials on the board. Hardly the typical ham and cheese turnover.

Their menu does include the standard café fare though, and goes through the typical list of sandwiches and light snacks before getting to the more serious main courses that I associate with a proper restaurant.

I start to wonder what this place actually is and how close to an accurate description has been given by the ‘café’ moniker.

We are attended to by a polite lady who takes our order for cold drinks and helps us throughthe specialities on the board. It is suggested all round that we order one course, what with it being such a late lunch and all that.

Inside I’m seething. A late lunch means it is farther away from breakfast than usual – all the more reason to order an extra course.

Loath to cause dissent, I pick the linguine allo scoglio al cartoccio since it not only sounds divine but also has the longest description. The other members of the little party ordered a seared tuna steak and the fettuccine gamberoni e pistacchio.

While we wait, bruschetta is served, covered with delicious tomatoes and a reasonably good olive oil. I normally just find the shortest route between my plate and my stomach when bruschetta is served but this actually gets us discussing it and wondering whether we should order more of the tasty titbits.

As we wait for our main (and alas only) course to arrive, we chat and watch people. The view from here is one of the major attractions of the area itself, with a clear line of sight across Sliema creek to Manoel Island, Valletta and parts of Gżira. This might be part ofthe solution to my mathematical mystery.

The other part is the attractiveness of people walking by and the fact that they’ve bothered to actually dress up rather nicely. I wonder whether they understand the importance of my Spider-man (The Amazing) T-shirt.

Soon our food is served and I am immediately pleased with the way the cartoccio is presented. The foil around the pasta is twisted into an interesting swan-like shape that makes the approachto the food inside a bit like unwrapping a gift.

Opening up the foil reveals a generous amount of all the scoglio had to offer, with clams, mussels, prawns and the obligatory langoustine. The sauce is concentrated but has seeped to the bottom of the foil. A bit of mixing is all it needs to coat the linguine, cooked al dente, and really bring the plate to life.

I sampled the plates around me in the name of research. The tuna that is available at the moment is largely of exceptional quality and this cut had been carved out of one of these lovely fish.

Even though it had been ordered rare but cooked beyond medium, the lemon-scented slab tasted excellent and remained juicy and moist. Just as enjoyable was the fettuccine gamberoni e pistacchio, unusual for Malta but a speciality in Sicily that makes for an interesting combination. The prawns were very fresh and this really helped drive their flavour as it competed with the relatively imposing pistacchio.

I couldn’t resist the offer of an espresso when prepared by a Sicilian café and it was just the way I like it – short, intense and creamy.

We drank our coffee and, unhurried by the excellent staff at Café Sicilia, took some time to plan the rest of our afternoon while comfortably seated. We agreed that the ‘café’ was a lucky find but not really a café.

While we had paid €20 each for a single course and a soft drink, the quality and quantity of food is hardly what we had expected of the place that seems to try and disguise itself as just another one of the cafés on Sliema front.

And so all the pieces of the puzzle to a simple and enjoyable meal had fallen into place.

Good company makes for a great meal, so I was happy toforgive the late hour and scoot off to my post-prandial planning of dinner.

You can send e-mails about this column to ed.eatson@gmail.com or follow @edeats on Twitter. Or both.