Ed eats

Storie e Sapori
St Augustine Street
St Julian’s
Tel: 2789 8927

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

You know the old adage about variety being the spice of life. Somehow, I’ve almost always heard it used in a slightly condescending way. While it is ostensibly a celebration of the wonderful variety of likes and dislikes that the human race seems to revel in, it is thrown around to mean that there’s something that someone else likes that we don’t quite get.

Maltese is a little coarser. The equivalent expression is roughly translated into the fact that once a cow has been butchered, every single piece of it will wind up on someone’s plate. We don’t quite celebrate variety. We manage to divide a village into ‘supporters’ of a particular saint, such is our everlasting quibble with diversity. Maybe, it’s because our islands are the undisputed epicentre of the known universe so everyone else might as well get in line with our preferences.

I’m regularly asked about the football team I support. Having been born with a man’s naughty bits somehow places me within the football fan tribe. I have no preference because I don’t like football. This does not mean that I actively dislike it. It is merely a sport and, like most sports, it just does not fall within the outer ring of my radar of interests. When I say this, I’m given a quizzical look that betrays the quick scan for what’s terribly wrong with me, then I’m consoled with the cow expression. Like I need the sympathy of the bigot asking the question.

I do get being a fan of something or other though and I appreciate the emotional rollercoaster that football fans relish, the unpredictability of the sport, and the thrill of watching your favourite team overcome adversity. I’ve even endured watching helplessly while a football match turned otherwise-rational members of my immediate family into feral animals. Then, when it’s all over, their planet resumes spinning like nothing ever happened.

I walked into a restaurant last week that had piqued my curiosity because of the ‘St Julian’s -Valletta-Naples’ addition to the sign on the door. And, by the time I’d picked a chair, I realised that I was sitting right under a TV that was showing a football match. Naples were playing and a couple of tables around me were occupied by patrons intent on balancing a meal with watching the match.

Luckily, they were nothing like the football fans in my family. These Neapolitans were civilised members of the race and they struck a balance between the occasional breathless moment as the commentator’s pitch rose to a falsetto and eating as if nothing was amiss for the rest of the time.

Also intent on keeping tabs on the score was the entire service staff. They’d been uprooted from their native Napoli and had their home boys battling it out against some other Italian team so it was natural that they’d want to keep an eye on the pitch and another on my table.

By the end of the evening I had to compliment the man who had been tasked with keeping us fed. He’d done a remarkable job of this balancing act, keeping close tabs on us while sneaking glances at the TV. And, happily, so had his colleagues. I found myself feeling pleased for them and their ability to avoid missing out on the action while they worked deftly and competently.

The restaurant itself is pretty decent, particularly for one that seems to have been built into a marquee. It is tastefully decorated and has a wall full of celebrities that Naples is proud of. Some were born there, like Totò and Pino Daniele. Sofia Loren has a slightly more tenuous link unless you count the movie that claims that it all started in Naples. There’s Maradona on the wall as well, and he didn’t need to be born there to earn the love of the city. Even someone with my spectacular lack of football knowledge gets that.

The squid was seasoned with a masterful restraint

The menu isn’t a complicated affair. There are starters, pasta dishes, a handful of main courses and a list of pizzas. This put me in a bit of a quandary. I can’t walk into a Neapolitan restaurant and walk out without having eaten a pizza. I love the purity of approach that this style of pizza takes. Trying to imitate pizza from Naples almost inevitably leads to an overburdened mockery and I seize every opportunity I have to taste the proper fare.

The issue lay in my desire to sample more of the menu. The solution, I thought, lay in the possibility of picking the right starter and then progressing to a pizza. The better half was all set on having the grilled squid for main course, so I’d get to try out the kitchen anyway. For starters we chose the fritto misto, mainly because this gives me the pleasure of sampling across different flavours. We added a bottle of Fiano to the mix and settled in.

Our starters took a while, the length of time possibly seeming longer because I’d worked up quite an appetite by then and, when the dish was served, I was quite pleased with the generosity of the portion. We’d ordered one to share and there was plenty. Two arancini, one with ragout and the other with ham and cheese, were just about average. Making up for these was a delightful little croquette with ham and cheese. There were some rather insipid fried balls of pizza dough to go with these and an abundance of tempura fried veg, largely in the form of courgette and carrots. These were surprisingly enjoyable to nibble at and they did all they could to keep my anticipation for the pizza at bay.

Our main courses were served quite soon after we’d cleaned most of the starter dish. The grilled squid is served simply on a bed of rocket and with a simple side salad. The squid was quite large and had been neatly scored and grilled at a very high temperature so the edges tasted singed and the flesh was just perfect. It was also seasoned with a masterful restraint, with most of the interest coming in the form of poppy seed that had been toasted by the heat of the grill.

I’d ordered a pizza with sausage and friarelli, the lesser known cousin of the broccoli family. There’s no tomato on this pizza so the slightly bitter flavour of the green leaf is as pronounced as it should be, complementing the unctuous and savoury sausage. It was simply seasoned with a hint of chilli and finished with an excellent olive oil dressing. In the Neapolitan tradition, the sourdough based pizza enjoys a uniquely short cooking time at a ferocious temperature and this gives the base its unique texture and flavour.

And thus our meal came to an end. As tempted as I was to try a sweet, I simply had no room left for one so we finished off the wine and settled the bill for just shy of €60. The wine, at €22 for the bottle, was responsible for a third of the price we’d paid.

I consider a €12 pizza to be on the upper limit when the cost of the ingredients is factored as a single contributor but the cost of running a restaurant in this location must be eye-watering so I can’t really complain. In fact, as I walked out, I made up my mind to return quite soon for another stab at the pizza menu, one that would serve the higher ideal of the Neapolitan tradition and marry buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes. How else can I live up to the icons that beamed at me from their framed images on the walls?

You can send e-mails about this column to edeats@gmail.com.

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