Ed eats

St Paul’s Boċċi Club
20, Mediterranean Street
Valletta
Tel: 2124 6114

Food: 6/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 9/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7.5/10

Last week I touched on the little voyages of discovery and rediscovery that my week sometimes allows. It set the old cogwheels in motion and I figured that, when the opportunity presented itself, I would share a few snippets that could be interesting, even if they don’t warrant an entire column to themselves.

I’ll kick-start this process with a coffee. There’s this little coffee cart/van that I encountered this week. Tidily tucked away in the shade of the vast magnificence of Mosta’s parish church, it looks even tinier than it actually is. It has been neatly modified to house a coffee grinder and one of those manually-pumped espresso machines that look awfully charming.

The menu of the playfully-named Coffee Circus goes through the list of obligatory ways in which to mask the taste of coffee, and I sympathised with the guys running it for having to yield to their market’s whims. They evidently love coffee.

I ordered a double espresso and they weighed the freshly-ground coffee on a little set of digital scales. Such is their love for the product that they dispense it like an illegal drug in the movies. The coffee was good. Really good. I’ll be following their whereabouts from now on.

On an unhappy note, I also revisited Badass Burgers in Valletta. After over an hour’s wait, I paid the bill for our drinks and wound up walking through the Golden Arches for much-needed sustenance.

The four of us, who had so enthusiastically decided to have a lovely night out on the town, ended up in a terrible mood. When restaurants provide such abysmal service, what they fail to realise is that they’ve done worse than starving their patrons – they’ve ruined their evenings.

As we walked to our table carrying trays full of burgers wrapped in branded paper, the entire party of 10 that had been at the table next to ours at Badass walked into McDonalds as well.

They looked at us and smiled, knowingly. I’d felt quite insulted when I walked inside Badass to pay the bill and the manager told me, quite patronisingly, that she ought to explain how a restaurant works.

Seeing that a third of her patrons that night were later having their stomachs filled at a fast-food chain should be a lesson in humility, if nothing else.

Determined to enjoy an evening in Valletta, I heeded a tip about an unlikely source of food in the city.

Two of my friends, both of whom love a good story as much as they enjoy a decent meal, told me that the St Paul Boċċi Club had fed them well on a couple of occasions. Playing boċċi isn’t something I’ve done for quite a while, so I had to ask where the place is. Just under the Independence Bell, they both said, as if rehearsed.

Parking there during the week is refreshingly easy and I climbed a few steps to the club with a growing curiosity. Both of my friends had mentioned eating rabbit and I expected a fenkata, but the place looked more like a bar that hasn’t changed since the 1970s, so I wasn’t certain I’d come to the right place.

We all agreed that we’d be back for the rabbit, the view, and the truly welcoming service

I walked up to the bar and said I was there for dinner. I’d called in the afternoon to make sure the place would open that evening and the man at the bar must have immediately recognised my voice because he asked if I was the one who had called earlier. Either that, or we were the only reservation.

He seemed delighted that I’d made it and I explained that I’d asked for a table for three but had adopted another couple since then. At this point he handed the baton to his dad and said we’d be just fine.

The dad, also thrilled to help out, led me to the narrow terrace. A small table, with a checked table cloth, three wine glasses, cutlery for three and an ancient ‘Reserved’ sign awaited us, with the brightly-lit bell and the Grand Harbour dominating the view.

I’d be happy eating plain bread all evening just to occupy a chair at that table.

The elderly man busied himself adding a table to ours, shrugging off my offer to help out. He laid the second table just as neatly as the first and smiled happily when he was done, humbly offering me a seat at table.

Eventually the rest of the party trickled in and we asked whether they had a menu we could peruse. Another man turned up this time, smiling broadly and genuinely happy to have us over. He passed on a single sheet of paper for us to share.

The menu was handwritten on it. No matter what the food is like, this place has tons of charm. And this isn’t manufactured charm. It isn’t the scripted charm that is designed in a studio a hundred miles away from the restaurant and printed in faux-vieux fonts on faux-distressed paper.

This is the real deal. The huge bell must have opened a wormhole on to sometime in the past when everyone was happier to receive patrons as if welcoming them into the family home.

I hadn’t expected the menu to launch into Fettuccine con ricci and go on to include a dish of king prawns and mussels. I looked up at the view again and thought that my evening suddenly had even more potential than I’d imagined.

In-between tuna steak with capers and grilled rib-eye were more traditional dishes of rabbit and horsemeat, each with their own sauce, and served with chips. I haven’t seen horse on a menu for too long so, even if I’d been dead keen on trying the rabbit, I decided I’d see what the knackers had been up to.

The rest of the table were mildly horrified by my choice and went with rabbit, linguine with king prawns and even the mighty dish of prawns and mussels. We ordered beer all around and settled in. We chatted for quite a while, and were on to our second beer by the time our food was served.

There were generous portions all around and we all dug in, eyeing one another’s plates as we did so. The horsemeat had the texture of beef that one would consider too tough, so it didn’t really win points for a pleasant bite, but the stew it was in was rich with curry and cloves.

I dipped bite-sized chunks in the sauce and it made for a much more pleasant meal.

The rabbit, on the other hand, was hard to fault, served in its own sauce and very tender.

I was lucky to get most of the offal from one of the more squeamish diners and nicked a leg from the other rabbit eater, since he evidently wasn’t going to eat through the entire dish.

All was reasonably well in the fish-eating section of the table. I tried the mussels and loved the tomato sauce they were in, with plenty of black pepper springing into the foreground and lingering for a while.

The mussels had been frozen at some point, but I wasn’t expecting anything else from a dish that didn’t even glimpse the €20 barrier and included half-a-dozen king prawns.

Again, the prawns weren’t of noble provenance and one or two of them had smelled faintly of ammonia. The rest were fine but I’d rather not have prawn on the menu than eat dodgy ones.

By the end of it we were all filled to bursting and very pleased with ourselves, dipping fresh bread into the remaining sauces just in case there remained a vacant seam in our stomachs. We all agreed that we’d be back for the rabbit, the view, and the truly welcoming service.

Paying just €16 each we felt we’d made quite the discovery. The family had shown us how a restaurant works. Only they’d done it with such wonderful humility.

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