Gunas by Miss Roberta wins the award for the most unlikely location even before you set foot inside.Gunas by Miss Roberta wins the award for the most unlikely location even before you set foot inside.

Ed eats

Gunas
35, Eagle Alley,
Marsa Waterfront,
Marsa
Tel 2122 1439

Food: 6/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 5/10
Value: 8/10
Overall: 6/10

With little fuss, the year has started. There is such a build-up to the date that we should expect something to change on January 1.

It would be fun to wake up to a brave new world every January, where everything we know is a little different. We’d then have a year to figure things out before it changes all over again. It would definitely make the year end worth making a ruckus about and life would be much more interesting.

As things stand, we picked an arbitrary date and created a big aura of importance about it. We’re a hilarious race that way, but at least we feel like we matter, like our celebrations help usher the new year in a way that it wouldn’t have if we’d just gone about our business normally on December 31. And because we’re human, we associate every celebration with eating and drinking larger quantities of food we wouldn’t normally eat.

Let’s face it, and I risk being lynched here, the turkey isn’t a particularly tasty animal. There are bits of it that are lovely but there are vast swathes of its meat that are not special at all.

Not unless you’re after a very healthy and practically tasteless slice of meat to add to your salad. It does push us to be more creative in the kitchen, because there is only so much you can do to make a big chicken interesting.

Now that Christmas has passed, and that you’ve turned all your leftovers into sandwiches with plenty of mustard, ask yourself when you’ll be buying a turkey next.

It is fine to shake things up. We respect traditions mostly because they separate us from people from other countries. Surely, you realise that many of our culinary traditions have been imported or rather forced upon us, during times when we were a colony of whoever thought the Mediterranean fashionable at the time. So next time you’re buying a turkey, and I bet that around 50 weeks will have gone by until then, consider an alternative. Any alternative really.

We have no excuse when it comes to novelty in the kitchen other than self-imposed ones. It’s fine if you don’t think you’re creative – just steal ideas.

There are food channels on TV, recipe books are taking more shelf space than fiction at bookshops, and an internet full of food blogs and recipe sites to nick ideas from.

And for the sake of every food deity since the dawn of time, breathe some life into your kitchen.

The result will be a more culinary, interesting nation, a new generation of kitchens that are spewing innovation and multicultural cooking.

Perhaps more importantly, it will create a tribe of diners who are less forgiving because they know what a kitchen should be dishing out. It will also open the minds and palates of the generation that will inherit the nation next. They are already more interested in food than my generation ever was and this is good news.

There are exceptions. I recall an instance where our order was mixed with that of the adjacent table at a particularly pricey restaurant. The young couple at this table ate half of our duck and our pork before they were told by the staff that they were not eating the beef or the fish they’d ordered. Eating pork when you’ve ordered fish is stretching apathy towards food to its very limits.

May we use our mouths and our wallets to separate the good stuff from the awful, so that this time next year, we’re eating better food for less money

I’ve been writing this column for over six years and have been very generous to many restaurants I’ve visited, understanding that this industry is as much about serving good food as it is about running a business. I wouldn’t like a little slip on a bad day to wreck a restaurant’s business if I wrote about it too forcefully. However, I also see that, by and large, the level of food being served to the public is lower than it should be.

We’re a population of passionate, fun-loving, gregarious and food-guzzling individuals to whom food counts. A lot. Why we’re prepared to pay too much for poor food beats me. We should be the nation others look up to, the cultural melting pot, the source of the freshest ingredients, the tables with the liveliest atmosphere, the most friendly service by the most friendly island dwellers on earth.

Instead we make do. We satisfice. We use words like jgħaddi (make do) when referring to food and service. And in doing so, we render ourselves, the consumers, a huge disservice.

Reversing the trend isn’t that hard, particularly as more people fit into the economic band that drives the delivery of good food. Just 15 years ago we didn’t associate the UK with great food. Today, my challenge in the UK is to eat as much as my wallet can possibly permit, such has the culture changed in favour of excellence. We’re smaller, so the transition can afford to be even more rapid.

I’ll wrap up this new year rant with a proposed resolution. May we all do our bit to raise our culinary level to where it should be. May we use our mouths and our wallets to separate the good stuff from the awful, so that this time next year, we’re eating better food for less money.

There is still room for a quick review, and this time we travel to a very well-concealed alley beneath the Marsa power station. Gunas by Miss Roberta, for such is the full name of the restaurant, wins the award for the most unlikely location, even before you set foot inside it. Situated half way down the charmingly named Eagle Alley, this is the sort of place you visit upon recommendation and not purely by chance.

I was intrigued by the very fact that there is a restaurant here at all. I popped by for lunch with a couple of close friends and Gunas was evidently not expecting custom. The chairs were inverted on the tables and the incessant beat of club music was playing at a gentle volume in the background.

We were quickly made to feel welcome, with smiles all around and a quick effort at chair-shifting. The decor is someone’s idea of combining old with new and it just doesn’t work for me. In this area, much more could have been done to preserve the spirit of the place than to add bright and shiny colours and materials.

The menus are simple and effective, with emphasis on pasta dishes and platters, along with a few of the more familiar main courses. I was accompanied by The Bear, a man who has had the terrible misfortune of being exposed to excellent food all his life and who wanted to try the carbonara. He is a purist and explained that the perfect carbonara would be his measure of the capabilities of a kitchen.

The carnivore ordered the rib-eye, served rare. I went with a total wildcard, keeping my expectations as low as possible, and ordering the lobster ravioli.

While we waited and drank beer and wine, we were served galletti (water biscuits) with a chickpea dip and a tuna dip. The young lady who served us knows what she’s meant to do and does so with an efficiency that shows she’s able to handle more than just the three of us. She is perhaps a little overfamiliar but this seems to go with the spirit of the place.

The food took the right amount of time to be served and we were all served at once. The steak was a generous portion of overly fresh meat but at this price one doesn’t expect a well-aged cut. It was grilled to the right temperature, served on top of a little mound of decently steamed veg, accompanied by a surprisingly enjoyable mushroom sauce and with the happy addition of a bowl of pretty decently baked potatoes.

All was not so happy in pasta-land. The carbonara’s creaminess had been assisted by some dairy meddling and, as The Bear pointed out, this is a cop-out. My ravioli were quite boldly filled but the sauce had so much garlic in it that I could hardly taste the filling. Once again, the sauce was compensating for something. The food wasn’t bad, and being hungry we ate it; it was just not the kind of food that would have us return in a hurry.

The bill for all our food was decent and gave us change from €50. I applaud the creators of Gunas for picking a totally random location and developing it into a restaurant.

I’d also recommend they look into the grammar of their strapline. Eat good, eat healthy doesn’t put them on the list of restaurants the Queen would visit if she decided to pop by on holiday.

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

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