Ed eats

Scappi’s Trattoria
47, Main Street
St Julian’s
Tel: 2137 7641

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

There are nuggets of practically useless information that somehow creep into a crevice in my head and rest there, often for decades. This could sound like a good thing. It isn’t. The gratuitous trivia merely occupies space that could be applied to remembering something useful.

Irritatingly, I hardly ever remember where the smidgen of knowledge came from. More frustration ensues when I can’t recall context, rendering the information practically useless. It is like that drawer full of cables one keeps just in case one of them can ever be useful, even if the devices they belonged to are probably enjoying the methane whiff of the landfill that forms their current resting place.

When I noticed that the restaurant formerly known as L’Ordine had been spruced up and is now called Scappi’s, I felt that I knew the name somewhere. I struggled to attach context to the word and failed. I resolved to look up the word when I wasn’t driving, a resolve that waned with the next curve in the road and vanished by the first set of traffic lights.

The next time I drove past was just in time for dinner. I quickly decided I’d get to the bottom of things, so I drove around Balluta looking for a parking spot.

This proved easier than I thought and I was seated just five minutes later. I’ll skip the whole evening for now and go straight to the part where I actually looked up the word and, as is customary, slapped my forehead when I found out who it referred to and where I’d heard the name.

A while ago I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with a food writer (among other things) called Tom Parker Bowles (he is her son, that’s why the surname is familiar). He is the most incredibly well-read person I’ve met where food is concerned.

He recommended books from the first century work by Petronius that describes the legendary banquet of Trimalchio to Julia Child’s brainchild.

He described each with a familiarity as though he’d just read all of them on the train that very morning. His list included the magnum opus of Bartolomeo Scappi, a renaissance chef who collected over a thousand recipes into a single volume and that had only just been translated to English.

The oeuvre, he said, was worth having a copy of. I have yet to get down to acquiring one.

So what was once L’Ordine is now a tribute to a chef whose reputation has lasted almost 500 years. I couldn’t wait to have a look at the menu. These were delivered by the man who had served us when we’d last visited the place, so I guessed that the new owners must have hung on to the front of house staff. Not one to leave well alone, I asked about whether the place had changed hands, chef, and whatnot. Well, the short answer is no. They changed the name and menu to coincide with the revamp.

The menu is new. The pizzas have gone, replaced with a selection of pasta that includes fresh pasta. All the starters are listed as antipasti and the selection is pretty standard, even if the name of every item is translated to Italian.

My second lunch had been quite generous, so I wasn’t particularly hungry but I wasn’t leaving without trying the fresh pasta. I made the painful decision of skipping a starter and going straight to the pasta. I kept this to myself though, waiting for the better half to play her turn before showing my hand.

There was no indecision or hesitation on her part. She was starting with the polpette di neonati and topping that up with the bistecca ai ferri. I was almost embarrassed to admit my half measures but she reacted magnanimously and let it slide, even offering to allow me to taste the whitebait fritters if the portion warranted it. We settled for a bottle of Sicilian red and placed our orders.

The dining area has been cleaned up and modernised so that there’s plenty of clean, white surface, blue accents and some rather vivid art on the walls.

Music was playing in the background from an endless and seemingly random playlist on an ad-supported online streaming service.

The fritters were probably the highlight of the meal. With each fritter roughly the size of a burger patty, the portion was generous

The monthly Spotify fee, to mention one such service, is more than covered by the margin on our meal, so I still don’t get why so many restaurants are fine with the constant ads that urge listeners to upgrade to premium.

In short, the restaurant has finally made the transition into any generic trattoria. There’s nothing remarkable about the place, nothing particular about the service and, it would eventually transpire, there is nothing noteworthy about the food either. I realised that I’m bored of this.

There are too many interchangeable restaurants that deliver a practically identical experience despite the effort of each one to come up with an original name and ‘concept’. Perhaps the average diner doesn’t flit from place to place with the regularity that I do while on the call of duty, but doesn’t that make things worse?

If you’re visiting the same place time and again and there’s nothing memorable about it, don’t you wind up even more bored?

This was the gist of my rant as we waited for the starters and my audience of one was saved by a pleasantly presented dish that hosted three fritters and a green salad. The fritters were probably the highlight of the meal. With each fritter roughly the size of a burger patty, the portion was generous. The fry is a nicely dry one and there is plenty of tiny fish in there.

Strange as it may sound, they’re not meant to taste ‘fishy’ if they’re made of fresh neonati, but I’d be cheeky to expect this at this time of year, so I was happy to finish off one of the fritters.

Our wait to the main course was a shorter one. I’d ordered the pappardelle with rabbit ragout and thyme and the pasta itself was lovely. There was no more than a pleasant hint of thyme, so the rabbit meat had been left free to actually taste of rabbit.

Apart from that, the dish was bare so it was like eating pappardelle that had pieces of rabbit meat hanging on to it – not quite a ragout then.

The steak looked lovely and had been treated to hot irons as promised and served rare as requested. The meat was a surprisingly decent cut but something had gone awry with the seasoning so the surface of the meat tasted off. Skimming the charred bit off the top made it perfectly edible though.

This was a pity because one orders grilled meat for the charring. The potatoes that were served on the side had been an attempt at double-cooking but wound up tasting of deep-fryer.

Our host offered liqueurs as I asked for the bill that totalled just over €50. He had really done his utmost all evening to make sure we were comfortable and I had watched him do the same with the other occupied tables.

And thanks to this, his efforts were probably the most memorable part of our evening. Scappi’s had welcomed us in from the cold wind outside and fed us pretty adequately but a little more needs to be done in the kitchen for me to want to return in a hurry.

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