Ed Eats

NOVI202,
The Strand
Gżira
Tel: 2780 2740

Food: 7/10  
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 6/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 6.5/10

According to medicine, the average person is a man who is 170cm tall and has an average resting pulse of 72 beats per minute. Along with these measurements are a host of others that prescribe what’s normal for every single function of our body that we can safely and repeatedly measure.

As you can imagine, this guy does not exist. He was concocted from a whole bunch of averages and likelihoods and patterns that science has collectively observed ever since we started ferreting away smidgens of information about what it means to be this animal we call a human.

Luckily, there exists plenty of variation, and the more clever members of the species celebrate this diversity. But we still have this notion of a textbook person, the one perfect member of our species against which we measure all others.

And this pattern shapes the way in which we deal with most of what happens around us. We seek the average and consider it normal. For instance, it is ‘normal’ to eat our meals with a knife and a fork and a spoon. Tell that to the Chinese kid who is on her first family holiday to Tuscany, being forced to eat meat with these bizarre implements.

She is used to food being prepared by chefs who cut everything up so she can eat quite easily with a pair of chopsticks. She must think of all the chefs on this continent as quite lazy, leaving part of what’s considered essential food preparation to the diner.

When we eat out we expect restaurants to behave according to a list of parameters in some gigantic and quite possibly incomplete textbook. If bits of this are missing or erratic our experience is, to certain degree, not quite what we’d expected. Now this can be a good thing and these variations are responsible for plenty of pleasant surprises.

I happened to visit the same place twice on the same day. It is called Novi Bar, but adds ‘eatery and lounge’ to the name as a description of what we’re about to experience. And as these two experiences progressed, I found that their take on the textbook was a somewhat unexpected interpretation.

I arrived late for lunch. I was meeting three people and they’d already placed their orders, knowing that I wasn’t going to be punctual. I asked what they’d ordered and they pointed to a small, square card that had ‘menu’ written on it in a cheerfully scrawled simulation of the letter blocks that children love to loathe.

They’d all ordered gyros. Now if you’ve been to Greece, for instance, you know that it means kebab. The Greeks stole the word from the English word ‘gyrate’. Or perhaps it is the other way around. I asked whether they knew they’d ordered kebab and they seemed surprised. They were happy that it was a chicken dish and didn’t question any further.

There were three burgers and a couple of sandwiches on the card as well so I decided I’d order a burger and went to the bar to order one. As I waited to be acknowledged, I noticed that there were plenty more of the square cards on the bar, two of which hadn’t been at table. I took these with me, determined to select from a broader choice than my lunch companions and picked the pulled pork tacos.

I found their take to be a somewhat unexpected interpretation

I also asked whether they’d seen the additional menus and they were, once again, surprised. They hadn’t been made aware of their existence. Now it is considered quite normal at a restaurant to choose from all the food that’s available during that particular service but this hadn’t happened.

I’d have dismissed this as an oversight had the exact same thing not happened a few hours later. Four of us were there for dinner and we were given two of the three cards, with an additional one that listed the cocktails. These guys added a chapter on mystery to the textbook.

Two of the guys started complaining about the discomfort of the wooden stools we were sitting on. Now I’m not particularly fussy but then one of them pointed out the word lounge and wondered what kind of lounge seats you on high stools without as much as a thread to protect one’s posterior from chopped tree trunk. Once again, liberal interpretation of what’s expected had us stumped.

Our food was served all at once, scoring points in favour of my tardiness to the evident dismay of the kind gentlemen I was sharing a table with. The gyros were a very pleasantly unexpected deviation from what we’re used to when we hear about kebab. The pitta pockets had been filled with bits of grilled chicken that we could actually identify.

Small chunks of thigh and breast were smoky on the outside and succulent inside, seasoned beautifully and served as a pretty generous portion. That’s one way to deviate from the book that had three guys dig in with plenty of enthusiasm.

The taco is actually a serving of three, soft-shell tacos filled with kidney beans, sweet corn, red onion, red cabbage, fresh coriander, tomato, and plenty of pulled pork. The result is very messy, very tasty, and quite filling. There’s a sweetness from the sauce that helps the rather average pulled pork pull through and the fresh coriander adds a lovely freshness to the otherwise flaccid combination of ingredients. Bits of the meat were still a little cold but this didn’t really mar the experience.

We paid just over a tenner each, including a couple of large bottles of water and a coffee all round. Getting away with lunch for under a tenner has become something of a rarity unless you’re happy with a ftira.

The evening group was considerably more keen on food than the ones who’d been fed with me during lunch. Once I’d scavenged menus from other tables to make sure we get a complete set, they pored over them and discussed every item in detail. Two of them still picked the tacos, wooed by the prospect of pulled pork. I said I’d quite enjoyed mine a while earlier but wasn’t about to go for a second round. Instead I went with the Swiss burger. The promise of Swiss cheese and sautéed mushrooms was too tempting.

I was joined in burger forays by the remaining member of the party. He was having the more humble edition, humbly named ‘The legit’ on the menu. This stuck to the timeless addition of cheese and bacon to the beef patty.

We picked our beers from a selection that went from craft beers to big name Belgian brews spanning the relatively small Brussels Beer Project to titans like Duvel and the cheap and cheerful San Miguel. We were on our second round of beers by the time our food was served.

There’s a chapter in the complete dining textbook that has yet to be written. It is entitled ‘consistency’. And since the book is ethereal, the kitchen at Novi can’t possibly read it. The Tacos were quite different. There was no fresh coriander and it had been replaced with plenty of jalapeños, for instance.

I couldn’t exactly defend a dish that had been changed sufficiently to turn it into a different experience. Having nothing to compare with, the ladies who’d ordered the tacos grumbled a little about the pulled pork itself and then made short work of all three tacos. I tasted one and it wasn’t bad but paled compared to what I’d had for lunch.

The burgers were another story altogether. Burger master and I were very pleasantly surprised at the wonderful concoction we had just bitten into. The patty is made of a clever mix of texture and fat so it is full of flavour and offers a pleasant bite. It had also been cooked so it was still slightly pink inside.

The sauce is unctuous, the mushrooms plump and juicy, and the Swiss cheese slightly melted to coat the patty with olfactory glee. We found ourselves referring to what we were eating in terms of our all-time favourites and that alone is quite the accolade.

This time we paid a little more than we had at lunchtime, the beers making a bit of a difference, but €15 isn’t much to pay for dinner. Novi might be a little haphazard and, by the end of it, the potential for surprise turned into quite the endearing quirk. And no matter what kind of surprises they pull, they’re forgiven in my books purely on the strength of their burger.

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

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.