Ed eats

Medasia Fusion Lounge
90, The Strand,
Sliema
Tel: 2133 3222

Food: 7/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 6.5/10

I think one of the phrases that escaped my dad’s mouth most often as I grew up was ‘horses for courses’, indicating that there is a purpose-built solution to practically everything and that the generic solution most often just doesn’t quite cut it.

I’ll be back, possibly when I’m in the mood for horsing around a little more than I was that night

His keenness on all things specific landed us with a mind-boggling array of tools in the garage, utensils in the kitchen and, for some reason, a large number of empty glass containers.

I think he thought he’d collect more varieties of olives than nature saw fit to give us, more sizes of nails and screws than the ironmonger knew existed, and more fishing tackle than that used off the coast of Russia on a good year.

As one can imagine, this can be troublesome when moving house so some pruning is in order. Some of the horses (metaphorical ones, of course) without specific courses to run, had to stay behind. In no time, however, the paddocks had been repopulated, and we once more had just the right gizmo to suit any job.

Today I can ask him for just about anything and he has the right tool for the job, very often accompanied with the obligatory, ‘horses for courses’.

The same goes for restaurants. He will not order a steak at a fish restaurant, to mention but one example, and knows his favourite spots for his favourite foods. If one of these happens to be overseas, he is happy to wait until he is in the area until he next samples the dish he is after.

For years I quite naturally mimicked this behaviour and I am happy to say it served me in good stead. Having to write so often forced a change in this pattern and it has led to as many happy discoveries as it has led to disappointments. The latter has often been because I picked the wrong horse for the wrong course.

I made one such mistake last week and must make it clear at the outset that I was after one thing and found another, lest my judgement of ambience and service be overly coloured by my spectacular lack of judgement.

Two nights, two weddings and two early mornings in succession have started to tell on my ageing body. I rose on the third day feeling very much like underwear does as it lies in the linen basket – having gone through the entire spectrum of human emotion it is now slightly damp, slightly smelly and very unwanted.

I moped through the day and headed out for dinner, lacking the motivation to cook anything. I needed peace, quiet, and some more peace. And I walked into Medasia Fusion Lounge.

The place is too hip to be a restaurant but has tables and chairs so can’t be a club. It really lives up to the name ‘fusion lounge’, with loud chillout music and lighting effects creating dreamy patterns on the walls.

We sat at one of the tables downstairs but the incessant bass wasn’t helping to create the peace or the quiet I wanted. I popped upstairs to see what that was like and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a rather elegantly done up dining area.

In a matter of seconds I’d asked for a table upstairs and was seated.

The music upstairs hit me at a lower volume since it was mainly intended for the bar/lounge area downstairs so I was a step closer to what I was after.

One of the men in black who was assigned to the upstairs area delivered menus and stood to attention behind me, slightly to my left, and about a metre away so that he was constantly within my peripheral vision.

He went back to his base, a bit like the new-fangled vacuum cleaners that zoom around the house and then go back to their charging stations, and did this all evening until it became a little disconcerting.

The man was polite and very helpful though. He took our orders for drinks and helped us around the menu that is really quite self-explanatory. We picked a Vermentino from Sardegna and proceeded to pick our way around the menu.

Fusion does not really refer to fusion dishes. For the most part you get to choose items that are either Asian or Mediterranean, with few hybrid dishes.

We started with soups and a sashimi platter. I picked the won ton soup with beef won tons from a selection that included pork and prawn. The soup was a refreshingly simple broth, with plenty of lemongrass, bean sprouts, oyster mushrooms, and a couple of slightly uninspiring wontons.

So far this was more than I expected of a lounge but perhaps not at the higher end of Asian restaurant fare. The spicy prawn soup, laden with coriander and lemongrass, heavy on the citrus, with overenthusiastic use of fish sauce had a generous portion of shelled prawns and was as spicy as it promised to be.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have ordered this as a starter with so much going on, a zesty assault on the palate that will require quite a break before sampling the next course.

Served alongside as we requested it was a sashimi platter with 12 portions of sashimi, including fresh, if roughly cut, tuna, salmon, an excellent squid, and white fish. My only issue with this is that the soy sauce served with it came in the Kikkoman refill bottles. The Kikkoman bottle itself is a design icon, worthy of inclusion in design annals such as the Phaidon Design Classics.

The Medasia lounge has been really nicely done up, with attention to materials, colour, texture and appropriately eastern decoration. Attention to detail extends to the addition of a little stone wash-hand basin upstairs with a little pile of meticulously folded towels. They need to spend a little extra on the real bottle. It will work wonders on their beautifully laid tables.

For main course I ordered the curry pot. After choosing the red or the green curry (the green appearing to be hotter with a double-H notation meaning ‘very hot’), you get to choose beef, chicken, pork or prawn, as well as the side of rice or noodles.

I picked the green curry with beef and rice on the side. The curry is served in its own little pot atop a candle to keep it at a constant temperature, and rice has a separate pot all to itself. The curry was sweet, with evidence of coconut, lemongrass, cardamom, and citrus – very Thai but no real intensity of chili as I expected.

The rice was excellent. I try hard to prepare rice that is so perfect and have consistently failed to achieve this level of excellence.

Cantonese ribs, a starter on the menu but ordered as a main course, turned up ‘in their own sauce’, neatly laid out on a long, rectangular dish. I’ve never quite got the point of ribs but am assured they were tender and nicely coated in whatever ‘their own sauce’ was.

We were pleasantly surprised when, unbidden, the waiter turned up with a second serving of ribs in a display of generosity that I’m not used to when dining out.

Feeling quite full I debated whether I should try one of their desserts that had looked quite lovely on the menu. By this time the waiter was in standby mode. Try as I might I could not attract his attention as he stood at his base and I looked for the tell-tale red LED to indicate he’d been switched to power-save.

It did give me time to realise that I didn’t have room for dessert so we paid the bill for €70 and headed out. I wished I were in the mood for a drink at the very inviting bar but my body was quite uncharacteristically telling me to behave.

Being in a group of people in the right mood, Medasia has what it takes to offer both the food and the thrills. I will be back, possibly when I am in the mood for horsing around a little more than I was that night.

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

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