Ed eats

Bottegin Palazzo Xara
St Paul’s Street,
Rabat
Tel: 2145 4538

Food: 5/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Two writers I admire once took the time to write a dictionary. They were at an idyllic resort, tasked with finishing a novel. Instead, they picked a list of towns, mainly around the UK, figuring that they’re perfectly good words wasting their time on road signs and assigned a meaning to them.

The meanings were all those situations they felt warranted a single word but didn’t have one. For instance, they decided that the noise made by a dustbin lid that’s blown off in the night should be called Balzan. Malta managed a mention.

There’s this trend that’s finally caught on here that I consider an analogy to this bizarre and eminently entertaining dictionary (called The Meaning of Liff, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, if you were wondering).

The snooker table breaks the space into distinct areas.The snooker table breaks the space into distinct areas.

This is the way we pick a perfectly good social space that spends most of its time enjoying its own splendour in solitude, like most band clubs and sports clubs tend to do, and match them with a proper kitchen.

These clubs are, by design, meant for a bunch of people to meet within and spend an enjoyable time. They often include niceties like pool and table-soccer tables, as well as the obligatory bar. Add a chef and a proper menu and you’ve suddenly thrown the potential for a good meal into the mix. What better place to gravitate towards if you live close by?

During the week, these grand buildings with high ceilings and an enviable location in the village core could very well be patronised by half a dozen regulars who no doubt contribute plenty of character to the place but don’t quite pay the bills.

The addition of a restaurant doesn’t really harm the space but it definitely adds footfall and this contributes to the coffers.

I’ve been to a few, a couple of which I have yet to write about, and I’ve normally been pleased with the result.

The food isn’t always remarkable but the experience works, value tends to be great and I wind up spending time inside a building I might not normally have walked in to admire.

I was in Rabat on one cold and refreshingly wintry weeknight and had heard of one such place, so I decided to hunt it down. As is customary, this band club is housed within a splendid palazzo that looks like it is worth its weight in saffron and Iranian caviar.

And within the band club, like the third Russian doll, is the bistro called Bottegin.

When we walked in, there was a table of rather grumpy, elderly people who stared at us like we’d just flown in on unicorns. I stood there, wondering whether we’d upset them or just walked in on something but the braver better half just marched past the table, through a large stone archway and into the bistro itself.

Life in here was much happier. A bright bar occupies much of the right wall, neatly laid tables are spaced out around the rather large room, and a snooker table breaks the space into distinct areas. This helps. A single, continuous grid of tables could make the place feel like a canteen.

The kitchen really has a hold on this place and that’s a good thing

We were greeted by a young lady, bearer of a welcoming smile and a pleasant attitude. She showed us a couple of tables that we could choose from and then brought food and wine menus.

We ended up with a white wine menu, a red wine menu, a food menu, a beer menu, a sheet of daily specialities, and a hot chocolate menu.

There reaches a point where one requires the skills of a croupier to handle the number of menus at table. Surely, there’s a way of finding a more efficient way of communicating what is, admittedly, quite a lot of information.

From the list of specials, I spotted the skirt steak served with a beer sauce and was sold. At €16, this sounded like quite the deal. The regular menus contain quite a wide selection that ranges from wraps and sandwiches, through pasta and salads and all the way to proper main courses and even a selection of burgers.

The kitchen sounds like it’s run by someone who cares about adding a personal touch to the food and this keeps the whole thing much more interesting than I was expecting. The descriptions are impeccably spelt, thoughtfully written and there’s a welcome human touch that seeps through here and there.

Patrons normally have one line of communication – that with the front of house. When a menu sounds like it’s been written by a real person, communication with the kitchen happens before the food is delivered. A list of ingredients for one of the dishes, for instance, ends with ‘and just enough anchovies’. How’s that for a humble display of personality?

The better half decided she’d assess whether, in her highly biased opinion, people who order braġjoli are being given the real deal. Her own version of the traditional beef olive is bested only by her mum’s. That sentence is what one calls an investment in certain circles.

We placed our order with the ever-helpful young lady who had greeted us. She, too, had plenty of personality. She knew the food well and discussed it in detail when we asked questions, smiling pleasantly throughout. The wine we had in mind had run out, so we went through a few options together and finally settled for an Italian Appassimento that was very attractively priced. She also took most of the menus away from our table now, leaving just the two that made sense.

At around this time I usually look around the place and take in my surroundings. There was a very pleasant selection of French jazz playing in the background and this bathes anything in a more pleasant light.

The decor is unusually restrained and tasteful, particularly when compared to some of the more violent assaults on one’s eyeballs that I’ve experienced.

There’s the obligatory TV on the wall but it isn’t the kind of place to show football. They have a food-oriented TV network running instead. The kitchen really has a hold on this place and that’s a good thing.

At around this time I usually look at my watch, too. I do this to have a more accurate gauge of the waiting time than my own personal reading of time spent hungry and anticipating food. I tend to exaggerate wildly without a timepiece at hand.

When I’d taken note of the time, our food was served. I have no absolute reference here but I would guess that not more than five minutes had passed.

The steak is served as grilled strips and accompanied, at my request, by roast veg and potatoes. There was also a bowl of sauce on the side and I appreciate this. I’d hate to have my steak smothered beforehand.

Three beef olives make up a rather generous portion and they too were served with veg and potatoes. The other options were chips and salad and we felt like neither. I first tasted a slice of the beef olives. They’re the commercial restaurant type so the filling has been minced and blended and clubbed into sausage-filling consistency and it didn’t taste that much unlike Maltese sausage filling, admittedly with a much more balanced and delicate seasoning.

They actually tasted pretty good but the very core was still slightly chilled. They’d turned up so quickly that there hadn’t been enough time to heat them through.

My steak had been pan-fried so one doesn’t get the charring one does with grilling. I normally like this style, especially when fried in butter like this one had been.

Unfortunately, the steak was from a very poor cut, even for a skirt steak, and it was quite tough. I dipped in the sauce, a sweet and smokey liquid that made me wish for a much better steak. Luckily, the potatoes were nothing short of excellent, as was the roast veg, so I devoured every single bit of these and left half the steak.

We paid €50 for the meal that would be perfectly reasonable if the food hadn’t failed in an attempt to serve us quickly. There’s evidently talent in the kitchen so one could put my food down to a bad night or an inconsistent butcher.

Ultimately, the result was a perfectly enjoyable evening, aided and abetted by the remarkable service we’d been treated to. The kitchen deserves another shot so I’ll revisit, even if simply as another tribute to the genius that the restaurant każin combo actually is.

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

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.