Ed eats

Fratelli La Bufala
Pjazza Tigné
Tigné Point
Sliema
Tel: 2138 7888

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

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the very centre of busy metropolitan areas will know that the independently owned food businesses have almost all been taken over by chains and franchises.

Few places achieve this authenticity. If DOP is what you’re after this is as close as it possibly gets

Coffee shops in cities become Starbucks and Costa. Depending on where you are, snacks are served by one of a variety of fast-food outlets with a logo that is as well-known as the Coca-Cola identifier.

Not all chains are bad. If they promise a fresh sandwich and serve one at a reasonable price, then I’m not complaining, because they’re delivering on their promise.

The same goes for burger places. If it is any time between lunch and dinner and I’m up for a cheeseburger, I know I’m not getting gourmet at McDonalds because they never promised gourmet. So if I walk in and order a cheeseburger I know exactly what I’m getting, what I’m paying for it, and what it will look and taste like. Promise made. Promise fulfilled. Satisfied customer.

The worst offenders are those chains that are universally appal­ling. A particular UK chain of steakhouses comes to mind and they serve button mushrooms out of a can as a side dish to a steak that is coated with a congealed sauce. If they take the ‘steakhouse’ moniker away and replace it with ‘rubbish at fancy prices’, they’re well on their way to a more honest match bet­ween promise and delivery.

The ‘Italian’ places are almost universally disappointing. For a number of reasons, it is hard to eat Italian outside Italy. There is something about the way food is prepared that is nigh on impossible to replicate unless one has been brought up doing so, and ‘Italian’ chains that obviously have as much Italian heritage as the Queen of England are destined to let one’s tastebuds down.

Over the past few weeks I heard a few good things about Fratelli la Bufala. Then someone told me it was a franchise. I was sceptical. I tentatively tried to reserve a table one weekend and was told they were booked to capacity.

The places around the island that are consistently busy serve large portions of carbohydrate-laden food of average quality at a very cheap price. Could this be the sole reason for its popularity?

So I donned my raincoat and fedora, tucked my trusty Smith & Wesson into my belt, and headed off to investigate. Then I turned back to change. The summer weather in November and our gun laws had me in plain clothes.

The restaurant is on the piazza at Tigné Point and is far less flashy than I’d expected of the franchise label. A little research up front told me that they’d opened restaurants all over the globe and I was expecting the standard toolkit that makes a chain a chain.

Once inside we were met by a man who replied to our English in Italian. He might have been making a point. He might not feel happy speaking English. In any case, he filled me with confidence that Italian people are running an Italian place and my wall of doubt started to gradually crumble.

The menus are very heavily dominated by the presence of buffalo in all its imaginable forms. Buffalo for starters was available as bits and pieces of the animal itself as well as its milk in the form of ricotta, mozzarella and a number of cheeses.

The meat section is dominated by buffalo as various cuts as well as a buffalo hamburger. Pizza is split into two – the red ones with tomato sauce and the white ones without. I felt a distinct Campania theme working here and my hesitation turned into a healthy anticipation.

Service so far was brisk and impersonal. The guy who delivered menus vanished without so much as eye contact. The person taking our orders was just as concise and rushed off to keep up with the busy restaurant.

The place was packed on a weeknight and everyone seemed to be pleased as punch so I couldn’t blame him for being more practical than friendly.

I was definitely going for the Gran Piatto di Bufala for starters. It promised a number of cold cuts and cheeses, all buffalo derived, so I guessed it would be a reasonably efficient way to try as many ways to this prized cattle as possible.

The more sensible choice was made by the more sensible person at table, opting for a more starter-like Zuccotto di Melanzane. This would be buffalo ricotta served with aubergine.

For main course I was definitely going for a pizza, and what better way to sample the true star of Campania than to opt for the Mar­gherita DOP. This pizza actually benefits from a denominazione that guarantees the origin of its ingredients and the way in which they all come together.

The better half showed why she’d made the sensible starter choice. She was following up with a Tagliata di Bufalo.

While we waited, a basket of pizza base with olive oil and garlic gave us a taste of things to come. It was slim in cross section, dry and very light, with no real crunch to it and a more bread-like texture.

Within minutes my starter turned up and it was much more than I’d expected. The humble description does little justice to this spread that looks like an entire deli counter has been sampled.

Cured ham, bresaola, salami, and more cured ham shared a board with mozzarella, smoked provola, spiced cheese and a cheese I failed to identify – all derived from the buffalo, of course. The presentation is inviting and the flavour even more so.

By the time I’d finished this off and helped myself to more of the pizza with garlic I felt like I’d eaten enough already. The Zuccotto is a more reasonable starter size and the combination of buffalo ricotta and aubergine is simply perfect.

Our starters hadn’t been served together and neither were our main courses. Since decency requires everyone at table to be served before starting, this can be a bit of a problem but the lag between dishes wasn’t all that bad so the tagliata hadn’t really suffered by the time my pizza was served.

The tagliata is, as buffalo tends to be, not as rich in flavour as an aged beef steak but this meat retains a healthy amount of moisture to yield a juicy consistency with noticeably less fat in it. It is served with delicious potatoes and a barbecue sauce that, while considered superfluous by nihilists like myself, was thoroughly enjoyed by the carnivore next to me.

My pizza started off with a little too much liquid from the sauce at its centre. Within minutes this had settled down and the result was a proper Neapolitan pizza, with a very thin base and subtle flavour from fresh basil that livened up the very humble and soft-spoken mozzarella di bufala. Few other places I’ve been to achieve this authenticity.

If DOP is what you’re after, this is as close as it possibly gets. If you want a pile of ingredients, heaps of salt and a very crunchy base look elsewhere but then you’re probably not after the true spirit of pizza.

The dining area is a large space that is brightly lit, perhaps a bit too brightly lit where we were sitting. The décor is quite simple and some of the benches have a zen-like austerity to them that I happen to love. The sound levels were a bit high at times, as everyone in there engaged in conversation.

But this is not about fine dining or an intimate atmosphere. The spirit of the place is, like the large animal after which it is named, a brutally honest delivery of the most genuine of goods at a very reasonable price.

We paid €45 for much more food than we could possibly have consumed and every bit of it was as authentic as it gets outside Campania. The buffalo brothers may be running a successful franchise but they’ve figured out how to keep it all working like it was their only restaurant.

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

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