Ed Eats

Sotto
32, South Street
Valletta
Tel: 2122 0077

Food: 8/10  
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 8/10
Overall: 7.5/10

Imagine you could take a quick peek into the future and come right back to the present. You’re given just enough time to take a snapshot of the world in 10 to 15 years from today and then

you’re plonked right back where you started, armed with fresh knowledge about an inevitable outcome.

I had the dubious privilege of spending a few hours in the presence of a man who makes a handsome living predicting the future. He’s got the added credibility of having implanted himself with a number of electronic devices that do things like eliminate his need for car keys, for instance. I might be a cynic but I’m happier with a key in my pocket than an easily hackable chip underneath my skin.

But there’s more that his team and other researchers are predicting and it has a lot to do with food. One aspect that will be a certain reality, according to my bionic friend, is the widespread use of 3D food printing.

I won’t bore you with the details but these devices have the ability to ‘print’ a meal from scratch, given a basic set of nutrients. The intended outcome is actually quite noble. As the price of the device decreases, they’re meant to be deployed in the poorest areas of the globe, distributing nutrition to those without access to properly cooked meals and a healthy balance of nutrients.

With the food industry being maligned for the way in which it systematically destroys our eco system in favour of worldwide

distribution of food of dubious nutritional value, this comes as something of a silver lining.

Then again, no futurist was ever fired for not doing his job properly. Ten years after their predictions don’t turn out quite as they imagined they would, they have a million variables to blame for any inaccuracy. Let’s wait and hope.

My issue with printed food is naturally one of flavour, texture, and temperature, to say the least. It isn’t really the point of these devices quite yet but I’ll only sit up and listen with the eagerness of a prospective buyer when they evolve the ability to create the simplest of meals with reasonable accuracy.

Take the pizza, for instance. It is quite close to a 3D printed meal. A simple mixture of flour and water form the base. Other ingredients are systematically layered on top of that. Then a single source of heat binds the whole thing together. And by magic, this apparently sterile process turns the layers into a disc of happiness and comfort and nutrition.

Well, it is not always a disc. There’s nothing magical about a round pizza other than tradition. Rectangular ones, for instance, fit much more economically into

an oven, their shape inherently more space-saving than a circle. If you’ve ever played Tetris you’ll understand.

There’s this pizzeria in Valletta that seems to have arrived at this conclusion. It is called ‘Sotto’ and the reason is apparent when you get there. The entire pizzeria is underneath street level so you must negotiate a staircase before getting your hands and mouth on the goods.

The four of us walked out with a firm intention to return... as often as possible

The pizzeria is the second offspring of the capable hands and minds behind Zero Sei trattoria that’s just a short walk away. They’ve replicated their promise of simplicity and good value, offering a handful of starters, a couple of pages of pizzas, and a handful of salads as well as daily specialities that were all pasta dishes when we turned up.

Pizzas are divvied up into red and white varieties. Red ones have tomato sauce and white ones don’t. In the red pizza section you’ll find the usual suspects. Funghi, capricciosa and the proper marinara are all there. Even Norma makes a cameo.

The white pizzas live a life less ordinary. Porcina is a mushroom pizza but with no tomatoes and an emphasis on porcini mushrooms. Some of these, such as cacio e pepe and carbonara, sound like pasta dishes. Others are really an exercise in simplicity. Biancaneve (snow white) is just dough and mozzarella.

The four of us at table couldn’t quite make up our minds. Some of the pizzas didn’t quite inspire us but the ones that did made the choice quite an unbearable task. How could we pick four out of eight that really tempted us? We finally made our choices, knowing we’d get to swap slices, and added a 75cl bottle of Modican artisanal beer to the mix.

Service is quick and efficient, with the guys seeing to us all acting quite friendly in that slightly hurried way that makes for an efficient front of house. The kitchen is just as quick. We hardly waited ten minutes before four, rectangular boards were at table, each with a pizza on it.

I dug into my carbonara straight away. This is not the kind of pizza you allow to cool because the base, crisp and thin and light as it is, starts to lose its lovely texture as it loses temperature. Ingredients don’t weigh the whole thing down. They’re spread evenly and thinly to give each other a fair chance of representation.

This matters when you’ve

chosen a combination of ingredients that work because of their simplicity. Crisp guanciale and pecorino, cured and seasoned, give their unique and slightly salty edge to the creamy mix of mozzarella and egg they’re suspended in. It’s like I couldn’t decide on whether I felt like pizza or pasta and managed to get the best of both on a single, wooden plinth.

The amatriciana bears plenty in common with the carbonara. Eggs have been swapped for tomato sauce so there’s a lovely touch of that elusive umami going on. The result is a more savoury and slightly less creamy experience. It’s a good thing I got to taste both because I’d hate to have to pick just one of them.

The pizza Norma, with aubergine and ricotta salata, is exactly as you’d expect this classic to be. The aubergine and tomato are topped with shredded ricotta that’s added after the pizza has spent its time in the oven so it warms up slightly without melting into the rest of the ingredients. This allows its musky scent and slightly acerbic presence to form a lively counterpoint.

Perhaps the more unusual choice was that of a salsiccia e patà, a ‘white’ pizza with very thinly sliced potato and fresh sausage on it as the main ingredients. Mozzarella plays a valiantly supportive role in this unlikely take on bangers and mash. As thinly sliced as the potato was, it doesn’t quite cook through during its brief stay inside the oven and retains a little texture to it. And it is the texture that quite surprisingly forms the most interesting part of this pizza.

We rounded off the meal with two desserts to share between us. Three little cannoli and three little rumbaba turned up, ideal for sharing when you don’t have much room left but can’t leave without a sweet exclamation mark to mark the end of the poem that your meal just inscribed.

Just as sweet was the bill for €70 for the four of us. I’ll refrain from useless claims like ‘one of the best pizzas in Malta’. After all, your preferred style of pizza is where that claim ought to start. I’ve heard complaints about some of my favourite pizzas that came from people who didn’t know what a sourdough base is and

just presumed it to be an error in the kitchen.

I’ll just say that the four of us walked out with a firm intention to return. As often as possible. At least until some boffin invents a machine that prints pizza.

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