Pet’s Plates

Sharma
19, Casa Magazzini,
Triq l-Imħazen, Mdina
Tel: 2145 3817

Food: 4/10
Location: 8/10
Service: 7/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 5/10

You enter this restaurant and immediately think you’ve landed in a souk. Berber carpeting adorns the walls and floors and attractive pierced iron and coloured glass lights brighten up the walls.

The restaurant is housed inside a gorgeously-restored ammunition storage facility which dates back to the time of the Knights of St John. It still retains some of its original features, despite the heavy orientalisation of the interior. The building is, indeed, striking, lying right on the bastions.

From early summer, Sharma serves dinner on its beautiful rooftop terrace commanding spectacular views over Mdina, Mtarfa and Rabat. We were seated downstairs and, as happy as I was to sit in these colourful surroundings, I felt a moment of acute anxiety as I began to flip through the menu pages. Under the umbrella of ethnic cuisine, Sharma serves Arabian, Indian and Mediterranean dishes.

The menu read like a litany –usually not a very good sign. I immediately wondered whether this was yet another Maltese restaurant biting off far more than it could chew.

A second concern quickly followed. Sharma is a rather large restaurant. And with such a vast menu I worried that at least some of the food must certainly be prepared beforehand. And, as if on cue, a complimentary appetiser immediately arrived to prove me right. We were served a couple of grossly deep-fried vegetable bhaji that were literally dripping in oil and packed with tasteless sesame flour. They were not good and we couldn’t eat them.

Rob and I ordered a lassi each to accompany our meal. This yoghurt-based drink, native to India, comes in two varieties, sweet and savoury. We tasted the savoury, salted one and a sweet, mango one. They were nice enough and certainly refreshing. I was looking forward to a spiced meal and this would calm any angered taste buds beautifully.

To start, we shared a plate of dolma that looked so unappetising we were almost scared to tuck in. Dolma are found throughout the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia and the term refers to virtually any vegetable that is stuffed, with or without meat. Our dolma were of the grape leaf variety – cigar-shaped little parcels that should have been packed with fresh herbs and spices.

Alas, the boiled grape leaves were chewy and stringy, the rice overcooked and gummy and the mince of such poor quality that it was the consistency of dog food. The textures in my mouth were just awful.

The dolma were accompanied by what I think was supposed to be a garlic yoghurt sauce. A good dolma can be something quite exquisite and I’d recommend everyone to try them – only not here. I would advise against that most emphatically. I had to force myself to eat the ones served up at Sharma and quickly began to dread the food that was to follow.

Perhaps the chefs need to remove the quantity of dishes on the menu and focus exclusively on quality

For mains we shared a mixture of Indian and Arabian dishes. All dishes arrived together and very promptly. Even though the kitchen appeared to be struggling from the start, the service remained efficient and cordial throughout.

We tasted the beef shish kebab first. A jewel in the crown of Turkish cuisine, the ones we were served did not do this popular meat skewer justice. Our cubes of marinated, grilled beef were overdone and rather tough. We swiftly moved on to India where things fared much worse... The prawn curry we had ordered was possibly the worst I’ve ever tasted.

Firstly, there were no prawns. The ‘prawns’ were nothing more than tiny, frozen shrimps that were unsurprisingly rubbery and tasteless. A good prawn curry heaves with the heavenly aromas of garlic, ginger, chilli and coriander – a heady spice combination in a sauce of creamed coconut.

Ours was not authentic in the slightest. The overcooked shrimps were drowning in a bland, watered-down sauce that had no flavour or genuine fragrance. We ordered a side of pilau rice to accompany the prawn curry and didn’t even need to taste it to recognise that it was terrible. But a tentative tasting soon verified our suspicions. The rice was oily, greasy and overdone and tasted very much like it had been cooked in advance and reheated.

North African cuisine at its best can be summed up in one word – tagine. This conically-shaped pot is a traditional piece of earthenware used for sumptuous slow-cooking, while simultaneously passing for a rather decorative cooking vessel. Sharma’s Moroccan lamb tagine consisted of a lamb shank lying on a bed of onions, stewed in its own juices with tomatoes and potatoes. What should have emerged was a dish intense in taste and texture but, as with the rest of our order, the entire dish was bland and entirely void of any flavour.

This was quite an accomplishment on the part of the chefs when you consider that this is extremely simple cooking we are speaking of. You pack in the meat and vegetables along with a blend of good spices and it’s the tagine itself that works its culinary magic.

The slow-cooking was not enough to salvage the dish, despite lamb lending itself so well to this method of cooking. Sharma’s braised lamb was almost leathery. Strangely (or should I say, sadly), the prawn curry and the tagine were so terrible that, in the end, the mediocre beef shish kebab we had started off with actually proved the best out of all the dishes. And that is saying something. I badly craved some kulfi – a sumptuous Indian ice made from caramelised milk – but didn’t feel like another let down.

While I admire ambition, too many things had gone awry with the meal served up at Sharma. Perhaps the chefs need to remove the quantity of dishes on the menu and focus exclusively on quality. Perhaps they need to pick which cuisine they can cook best and endeavour to excel in just that.

Had they been consistent at Sharma? Yes, each dish had been consistently bad. And each course had only surpassed the other in terms of how increasingly ghastly the next dish could get. There was not one saving grace in all the entire spread. From the pitiable nature of the ingredients and the excessive use of oil in the cooking to some items being quite inedible, our visit to Sharma had proved a rather unpleasant experience.

The wine list was varied and fairly priced and, although food prices were also reasonable enough, nobody is happy to pay for food they’ve barely touched. We left without so much as a backward glance.