Ed eats

Fredy’s Diner
111, San Bartolomew Street, Qormi
Tel: 7713 1600

Food: 7/10
Location: 7/10
Service: 7/10
Value: 8/10
Overall: 7/10

I’ve come to terms with a terrible inability to remember people’s names. It is an affliction that’s been with me for as long as I can recall, and the results range from embarrassment to offence. It’s not like I don’t try. I make every effort to recall a name but somehow it just slips.

I’ve sort of figured out why it happens, even if this is no excuse. I meet someone new and the first thing they say is their name but my head’s too busy taking all the rest in and listening to what they have to say. If asked later on about that person’s likes and dislikes and interesting characteristics, they’re all in there to quite an acceptable level of detail. But the name – that’s gone.

I’m not the only one. I know this guy who swears he doesn’t know a person I’m referring to until I refer to the car he or she drives. Then there’s instant recollection. “Why didn’t you tell me it’s the guy who drives a 2014, white, VW Golf with a small scratch on the rear left wheel arch?”, comes the pained question.

Analysing his peculiar memory made me realise that I’m pretty much the same with food. I store every gastronomic preference and peculiarity of everyone who’s shared even a smidgen of food-related information with me. Luckily, I don’t judge people this way. I’d have far fewer friends than the dwindling number that I’m trying to hang onto.

This also helps me sort out meal companions by their likelihood to enjoy it. On one of those rare occasions where I bothered spending more than 30 seconds a week on Facebook I spotted a reference to an American diner in Qormi. It was a little like an excerpt from one of Douglas Adams’s weirder tangents, so I was immediately on the case. I spoke to the ribs guy (I know his name but he remains ‘the ribs guy’ more than anything) and asked if he’d heard of the place.

Well, he hadn’t. And he invited himself to join me for a try out. And then he invited another four people. Ribs guys like company. Then he proceeded, in his usual cautious way, to contact the people at Fredy’s Diner and make a reservation for a weeknight. It’s a good job he doesn’t take chances, because they were fully booked on that night so we postponed our meal by an entire week. That’s a long time when you’re curious.

To start with, the restaurant is directly across the road from the parish church in Qormi. I tried to think of an instance when I’d gone to Qormi for dinner and only came up with one, rather memorable, meal. But I’d been invited to a friend’s house that time so it doesn’t quite count as dining out.

Let’s face it, Qormi isn’t the gastronomic epicentre of Malta unless you count the food ‘fests’ that sporadically happen there and even these are restricted to a single ingredient. Fredy’s diner had a much more ambitious menu than any number of whateverfests.

The heart of Qormi might need to jog around the block to keep itself healthy but it’s been placed firmly on the food circuit

We were greeted by a cheerful team of young people and were instantly made to feel welcome. We ordered drinks and pored over the menus. They’ve been written in a distinctively cheeky tone of voice and we fell in love with some of the descriptions. Where they ran out of words, they simply invented new ones. Mr Adams is in good company here, with items like ‘dworplers’ and ‘eglopters’ sounding like they’d feel at home in a Dahl novel.

There are little Easter eggs snuck in as well. My favourite is the pizza called Hail Satan, priced at a rather convenient €6.66. This kind of menu devilry fits right in with the informality of an American diner. All we needed to find out was whether the kitchen could deliver the goods.

We ordered all over the menu and I think I was the only one who didn’t customise the dish I’d ordered. Everyone else swapped fries for corn on the cob or wanted their burger without gherkins and other such first world pettiness.

The girl who took our order wasn’t bothered. She cheerfully took the orders, taking careful note of everyone’s peculiarity and, in general, carrying on like they were happy to customise meals.

We suspected generous portions. That’s pretty much the hallmark of American dining. But we added a couple of starters, mainly because we wanted to try the weirdly named items and the Mac n’ Cheese. So we ordered a deep fried bucket to share and a main course of the Mac n’ Cheese.

The deep fried basket was a little disappointing. It is basically that stuff you try to avoid at weddings. The prawn dworplers are basically those little shrimp-in-a-pastry-case things that hardly taste of shrimp after their spin in the deep fryer. The rest were pretty standard chicken nuggets and mozzarella sticks and battered or breaded fried stuff.

This was where the disappointment started and ended though. The Mac n’ Cheese was as good as this cheesy and buttery concoction ought to get, with the lovely addition of sweet, caramelised onion turning it into a dish of unashamed indulgence. All this helped keep us going until the main course was served.

The portions are generous and the presentation is very straightforward. I’d ordered the slow-cooked brisket. Corn on the cob, a dollop of mashed potatoes, and four slices of beef are all that graced the plate and there was little effort to arrange them in an attractive manner.

When I tasted the beef, I was glad that all the chef’s effort had gone into cooking the food. It was unbelievably tender, very richly flavoured, and had this perfectly spiced crust giving the unctuous beef the final touch of liveliness it needed. The corn on the cob had been cooked to the point where the outside of each kernel just bursts when bitten and was smothered with melted butter. I could hardly bring myself to stop eating my food for a second and taste everyone else’s.

The burger is huge and, if I were to try hard to fault it, could only mention that I prefer a coarser mince. But I’m being picky. If I’d been the one who’d ordered it I’d have been as happy as Santa on Boxing Day. I then looked at the ribs guy. He’s hard to read when he’s eating, because he takes this sort of thing very seriously and frowns at his food as though daring it to walk off his plate.

I asked his opinion and he simply passed on a generous cut for me to taste. The meat is tender, the result of some lovingly slow cooking and they’re seriously smoky. They’re about as smoky as I can handle and, I suspect, my palate would tire of an entire rack but the bit I ate delivered the happiness of a savoury, mid-meal dessert.

There was all sorts of food being eaten around me. I asked about the salmon steak and was told it was nigh on perfect. I took a rather large bite out of a pulled pork sandwich and it, too, had been on the receiving end of much culinary love. Just as interesting were the sweet potato fries on the side.

When I looked around the table, there were happily satisfied faces all around. The common ingredient at Fredy’s seemed to be the ability to provide food that we’ve maligned for health reasons but, cooked lovingly, it can deliver hearty pleasure.

We paid €25 each by the end of it and this included a couple of bottles of wine, a few cocktails, and a trio of desserts, with the memory of the Key lime pie lingering longer than the rest.

The heart of Qormi might need to jog around the block to keep itself healthy but it’s been placed firmly on the food circuit. I swore I’d be back and will keep my promise because it is more of a pact with the devil. There’s that €6.66 pizza I’ve just got to try.

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