Ed eats
Palazzo Preca
54, Strait Street
Valletta
Tel: 2122 6777
Food: 8/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7.5/10
Returning from Italy always causes me to reflect about food. If this column weren’t restricted to restaurants that you, dear reader, can access quite easily, I’d include a complete account of my forays and escapades. I will share a little thought though.
There is something about Italian food that I don’t quite get elsewhere. I’m not referring to flavours and ingredients. That much is self-evident, especially since this applies to any regional cuisine. Then there’s love as a ubiquitous ingredient but even that is relatively obvious. I’m referring to the certainty with which food is prepared.
There seems to be a confidence, possibly based on centuries of tradition that border on the sacred, with which simple ingredients are assembled into a complete meal that turns out to be immensely greater than what a sum of the components could be expected to yield.
A simple panino seems to carry a seal that states ‘This is so’ with the sombre finality of a dragging tombstone. One simply does not argue with the result.
I contemplated this for a couple of days and tentatively mentioned my hypothesis to a young and spirited chef who was busy filling a bun with tripe for me. He shrugged, dismissing the notion as manifestly obvious.
The recipe for the beauty I was about to eat was 800 years old, he said. How can one go wrong? He then forced a glass of wine down my throat, even as I protested that I don’t normally drink wine with my second breakfast.
If eight centuries of being proved right don’t give you confidence then I’m not quite sure what will. This is not to say that Italian food doesn’t venture from the tried and tested. When this happens, Italian food is suddenly on a level playing field with the rest of the world, because innovation brings with it the necessary insecurities and possibility for error. And when this happens one must be a truly remarkable chef to produce truly remarkable food.
I shared this line of thought with my brother over lunch this week. He’s eaten his way across Italy a number of times and his knowledge is truly encyclopaedic. He’d asked me to join him at Palazzo Preca in Valletta and I didn’t hesitate, even when faced with the prospect of driving into Valletta on a weekday at midday. His choice of restaurant is one I trust more than I trust my own.
As we nibbled at galletti, olives, little crostini-like bruschetta and some very fresh bread with a monovarietal olive oil and butter with herbs, he gave me a mental tour of the country, taking a while to reach roughly the same conclusion I’d shared.
He then started speaking about the food we were about to consume. Having been four times in as many weeks, he told me that it would be wise for us to wait and see what the specialities for the day would be.
He also observed that the same playlist of jazz versions of contemporary popular songs was playing in the background. It was my first time there so I couldn’t complain. It somehow fit with the setting. The lovely Valletta palazzo has been redone in places and the same as I last visited when the building had a different name in others.
Somehow, the decor, the menu, and the loud level of conversation hadn’t quite filled me with the same anticipation that the way the food had been described did.
The menus were extensive and included a number of Maltese dishes clearly marked as such, evidently hoping to attract tourists. With this number of dishes on the menu it would take a particularly good kitchen to live up to the various accounts I’d heard about Palazzo Preca.
The dishes were described in a little more detail than I went into so far yet they didn’t quite prepare me for what was in store
A young lady, polite and cheerful, brought a little blackboard of daily specialities to our table and then went on to describe each one, managing to make me want every one of them. The great dictator across the table decided I was having the fillet, having tried it before and deeming it the appropriate dish for me. I put up little resistance but was a little mystified when he ordered a fish roulade for himself.
I was shocked that he’d seemed to skip starters altogether and quickly ordered the fried pasta dish from the board because it sounded like far too much goodness on one plate. Never the one to be outdone at table, he picked the cold octopus salad.
The dishes were described in a little more detail than I went into so far yet they didn’t quite prepare me for what was in store. The fried pasta was described as being served with sausage, and I expected a hearty, possibly heavy dish of oil and salt and plenty of pasta.
Instead, the dish in front of me turned up looking like it had just escaped a TV show. A beautiful pea purée formed the base atop which was a neatly constructed tower of slightly elongated, fried ravioli, each stuffed with cheese. Fried sausage, chopped tomato, and fresh fennel completed the picture and it was a particularly pretty one at that. Breaking up one of the ravioli revealed a lovely crisp pasta case around a creamy cheese core and dipping this half into a little bit of everything around my dish brought the flavours together beautifully. I wasn’t quite prepared for this level of execution.
The cold octopus salad was served with boiled potato and red potato and also quite thoughtfully presented. Little, fresh peeled broad beans added a local touch and, if you like the classical Italian cold octopus salad, this can be quite the treat.
The octopus was just firm, retaining a pleasant bite and all of its rather subtle flavour.
In the only dip in what was otherwise great service, our main courses were served within a couple of minutes of each other. Luckily it was my steak that came first and I don’t mind additional resting time. It was smelling very tempting though, served quite simply with a potato pureé and a truffle sauce, so my olfactory was just rearing to go.
As soon as the fish turned up I did so and cut into the two-inch-high fillet, seared on the outside and rare inside, as I’d ordered it. This was a fine cut of meat.
Even though it was crying out loudly for some more dry ageing, weeping liquid into my plate to make the point, it was tender and yet retained just the right amount of bite. The truffle sauce was relatively restrained so it did nothing to overshadow the meat.
The real let-down sat between our dishes in the form of pretty average roast potatoes and roast veg. I’d have expected a sumptuous double-cook that I’d rudely grab with my fingers and, in another violation of etiquette, dip them into my truffle sauce on the way into my mouth. These simply weren’t worth the effort.
Well worth the effort was the Merluzz roulade, served on a neat square of polenta that was black with squid ink. Just as my starter had been, this dish was a joy to simply look at and tasted the part.
The fish was nigh on perfect and had been perfectly salted. The polenta might have been quite thoroughly black but there wasn’t too much squid here, allowing the delicate flavour of the fish to hold its own.
Even if verging on the unpardonable, we didn’t drink any wine with our meal, both having things to rush off to that required us to pretend we were awake.
This didn’t stop the bill from reaching a rather hefty €80. I tried to think of my options for food at this quality where I wouldn’t have to pay at least that much and didn’t quite manage to do so though, so we agreed that the price was actually quite on the mark.
There’s plenty of skill in the kitchen, cleverly combined with a homely creativity. But there’s more. There’s love in the kitchen, and a surprising amount of confidence that is pouring into these dishes too.
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