Ed eats

Buffalo Bill
Portomaso Marina
St Julian’s
Tel: 21389290

Food: 5/10
Service: 5/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 6/10

No one ever asks why I don’t date girls I consider unattractive, unappealing and annoying. Yet I’m occasionally asked why I don’t write reviews of restaurants that are of a poor standard. Put another way, the question is why many restaurants I review achieve reasonably high scores.

Service is purely functional – taking orders, delivering food, clearing dishes. Ten hungry men are happy with this approach

The answer is that I actually enjoy eating and only ever visit places that I know or hope will serve food I like. If I hear many negative reports about the same place, I will not willingly subject my poor palate to torture. Nor any other part of my body, for that matter.

Another question I often hear or am asked by e-mail is what it takes for me to ‘notice’ a restaurant and then review it. Mostly it is a mix of my own snooping around and word of mouth. Inviting me to review a restaurant is like inviting the mother-in-law to assess your cooking. Once you’ve asked for it, expect the brutally honest truth.

And I’ll never visit a restaurant if I know I’m expected to. In time, like many diseases, this reviewer will come a-knocking. So best treat all your clients like they’re writing about it in the papers and you shall come to no harm.

There are the occasional events when I’m almost forced to eat somewhere that I have not heard anything about or, even worse, have heard bad things about.

A few weeks ago I picked up an e-mail thread that was already into its 20s, so by the time I figured out that we were all going out for an early festive dinner it was too late for me to voice an opinion.

Ten geeks would be having Christmas dinner at Buffalo Bill in Portomaso. And it turned out that this was our Christmas 2011 dinner, postponed by a mere 11 months.

We’re not deterred by this sort of detail. Geeks are very, very patient. We are direct descendants of that Beta male called ‘man the farmer’ who was more content to wait for plants to grow than to chase gazelles or whatever the hunter was up to.

Someone had quoted a set menu, priced at €30. Several others just typed, “I’m in”. I did likewise and popped the date into my calendar.

Set menus are a great idea to keep things simple when serving a number of people at this time of the year, and given a choice between set menus, that offered by a steak house sounded like a good idea.

I thought about Buffalo Bill. About 10 years ago, when the place still smelled of fresh varnish, we used to visit quite often. I remember one particular item on the menu. It was dauntingly called something like ‘The ultimate’ and was a T-bone weighing in at around 1.2kg. A friend and I used to devour one each and then head out for an all-nighter.

A bottle of Amarone or something similarly intense would be consumed with the steak. And every time we visited, the experience was a positive one.

Since then I never heard the name Buffalo Bill turn up in conversation when discussing steak. Chukkas, Str.Eat and the other venerable beef-lovers’ havens are normally names that one hears but Buffalo Bill seems to have lost its place in our conversations. I knew I’d find out why.

The place hasn’t changed much, and it was quite attractive to start off with. The wood panelling and other steak-house themed decorations like saddles and such like don’t really date so I suppose all is fine.

The service has changed though. We were served by people who are there to do their job and little else. Service is purely functional – taking orders, delivering food, clearing dishes – just like one would expect of a canteen. Ten hungry men are quite happy with this sort of approach, so no one was complaining.

I asked about the weight of the cuts on the menu and there was much discussion among the staff, including a trip to the kitchen and back, until we found out what size steak we were ordering.

I asked for the ribeye, quoted at 300g, and wanted it cooked rare. I prefer medium-rare but inevitably have my steak overcooked so I order a notch down unless I’m absolutely certain this will be respected.

The man who was taking my orders was having none of that. He explained that ribeye is well marbled and needs at least a medium cooking temperature, if not medium to well done. I held my ground for a while and then conceded medium rare, hoping and praying to the great cow in the sky it would not be overdone.

James Joyce is often paraphrased as having said that God created steak while the Devil created chefs. I have so far had more reason to disagree with Mr Joyce and hoped this experience would keep him in the wrong.

Our set menu included a choice of broccoli or tomato soup. Faced with that choice I ventured for the tomato, hoping for something savoury. We also had a trip to the salad bar, a bottle of ‘foreign’ wine between four of us and dessert.

Around the table the orders were for striploin, kangaroo steak, chicken breast and more ribeye. Bruschetta was served while we waited and the conversations started in earnest.

Behind us a TV was showing the evening programming on VH1 classic and our ages were revealed as we recalled different songs from different eras. What was wrong with the world in the 1980s?

My tomato soup turned out to be a tasteless warmed tomato juice, the kind served in hospital wards to patients with every chronic illness known to man along with another couple that have yet to be discovered. I had a couple of spoonfuls and gave up on it.

The salad bar was a little more inspiring and I quite enjoyed the mixed peppers, courgettes and aubergine, steering well away from the cold pastas.

Package-deal tourists at three-star hotels deserve that sort of stuff but they probably pay €30 for the whole week of food.

When it was time for our steaks, I was quite pleased that they were all served at once. This isn’t easy when all that meat at different cooking times is served and the kitchen did a great job of the timing.

Something went wrong in the timing of our sauces though, and these were served when we’d eaten all of our meat. This was not a bad thing since my peppered sauce was a tasteless bowl of cream with a couple of peppercorns in it.

The steak had been done all the way to medium, possibly a little more. This spelled disaster for the striploin part of my ribeye that, crying out desperately for another fortnight of dry-ageing, leaked liquids into the plate even at this cooking temperature.

The tenderloin side was quite nice though and I left it until the end to finish on a happy note.

My jacket potato was quite uninspiring and needed some sort of seasoning to make up for its lacklustre existence.

Around me, the less picky eaters were munching away. I asked around and got a pretty standard “It’s alright” about the meat. No one was raving about it but no one was complaining either.

I picked a sorbet that I enjoyed, and the selection of cakes was quite decently varied, allowing everyone to choose his favourite sweet. This time there were happy faces all around.

The bill was quite predictably above €30 each because we’d been charged extra for the sauces, even if we hadn’t quite consumed them because we had no meat to consume them with by the time they were served.

A very handy item within the set menu price was a car park ticket, so we’d all parked quite conveniently inside the Portomaso car park.

The restaurant and its terrace are quite enjoyable, the pricing is right, and the service is reasonably quick, if perfunctory. I wonder why, since the time I used to love the place, they’ve changed the meat. Why is it so hard to leave well alone?

You can send e-mails about this column to ed.eatson@gmail.com or follow @edeats on Twitter.