Ed eats

L’Aroma
17, Għar il-Lembi Street,
Sliema.
Tel: 2131 7633

Food: 4/10
Service: 4/10
Ambience: 3/10
Value: 4/10
Overall: 4/10

I just couldn’t let the tripadvisor.com issue alone. Looking back, I half wish I had. Maybe just telling the tale and sparing one person some misery will validate my efforts.

I’ll start with what I perceive as an issue. The site that is purportedly a tool to ensure you have a pleasant trip wherever you go is based on peer reviews. This means that the average rating of any place that features on the site is a statistical average of the opinion of people who bothered visiting that country and took the extra step to leave a review.

This works wonderfully in France, for instance. Since they don’t care about tourists and concentrate, instead, on caring for their country, they have made it so attractive that it is the most visited country on the planet. This means that the statistical average of the phenomenal flow of tourists from all over the world approaches the truth about any restaurant that’s reviewed.

In Malta, this fails. The top list of restaurants per village is peppered with awful tourist traps that serve rubbish to tourists hell-bent on a good deal. Evidently, they’re not quite bothered with the experience. If the place fills their belly for under a tenner, they log on for a bit of the old five stars and spend the rest of their stay eating at the same place.

I say the list is peppered because, luckily, more discerning diners also have their say, and they vote up some really lovely restaurants. And this is the issue. Tripadvisor has a wildly inconsistent top 10 and this makes it quite useless. Why would I trust a chart that’s a minefield? It’s almost as bad as listening to pop charts on the radio. You never know when Justin Bieber could strike.

So while visiting a restaurant you love that is also highly rated reassures you that you’ve made the right choice, you can’t depend on the list to point you in the direction of a restaurant that’s just as satisfying.

I gave this a shot a few weeks back and was happy to end up at a place that was actually quite decent. I thought it was a fluke and thought I’d give it another shot. I commissioned the better half to pop on to the site and pick any restaurant in Sliema from the top 50 – one she’d never heard of. This would make sure I wouldn’t be biased by spotting a familiar place and making sure I’d have a good meal. L’Aroma, she proclaimed, and described how to get to it. I groaned. It occupies the spot where Cafe Roma once was. See what they did with the name?

I’d picked this system for myself and couldn’t quite back out. Even when I got there and saw a sign outside that says their menu is available in six languages. Even when I recalled that the location is basically the bottom floor of a hotel. And the restaurant feels like a massive hotel restaurant, designed to cater to the deal hunters.

We were seated all the way inside the place and, luckily in a corner. Waiters were rushing all over the place so if we’d been anywhere more central, it would have been awful.

They clearly did not expect to have a full house and were totally understaffed. The waiter who was responsible for the area in front of me kept breaking into a trot to keep up with the mayhem.

Light is bright and very unflattering, shedding a canteen-like glow over the disarray. Lift music was playing in the background, sounding very tinny and irritating, with the rest of the noise coming from the loud chatter of over 100 people sharing an uninterrupted space.

Tripadvisor has a wildly inconsistent top 10 and this makes it quite useless

No one took our orders for about 10 minutes but one guy kept looking towards us when we tried to attract his attention, each time mouthing and miming from across the room that he’d be with us soon. “Ġej ta!” he mouthed.

We attracted the attention of one girl who clearly had no jurisdiction over our part of the woods but kindly offered to take our drinks order. A colleague of hers helped out and we had our glasses and bottles over in seconds. They don’t open the water bottle. That would slow the poor guys down.

She did, despite the rush, take the time to serve our wine well. I thought I’d need a cheap red to take the edge off things.

A young man finally came to take out order. He looked exasperated and I tried to make sure we placed out orders for braġioli and a pizza prosciutto quite quickly. He pointed at a salad bar and said we could, and should, help ourselves to it. He suggested we do so because the food would take a while. Too many patrons had turned up at the same time, he explained.

I got up, hunted for a plate, walked around the central station, and put the plate back. The dishes were almost empty and I wasn’t up for anything they had once contained. I attacked the bread and butter instead. Eventually I saw waiters replace some of the dishes but there was nothing worth getting up for, even if quite a lot of time had passed since we’d ordered.

When I’d been seated for just over an hour, I seriously started doubting my food would ever turn up. Fifteen minutes of torture later, I’d had enough. I asked one of the waiters for the bill for the drinks we’d had and said that we’d be leaving. He asked whether we’d eaten and we explained that we’d be happy to pay for the wine and the water and head somewhere else.

He headed off and I started thinking of what a restaurant review would read like if there was no actual consumption of food involved. Would it not be a valid account of my experience at that restaurant, starvation and all?

It was now 9.45pm and they were still seating new patrons. If I’d waited all this time to be served, I hoped Cinderella wasn’t among the diners or she’d have to leave mid-munch.

Our man returned less than a minute later to tell us they’d be fine with rushing the bill over but that our food was ready and waiting in the kitchen. I said I quite naturally wanted my food and they brought it over.

My pizza was edible. It does in no way enter the realms of memorability but it was large and I was hungry and it made a valiant effort at filling me with warm comfort. The base was dry and very even but the ingredients were what you’d get at a kiosk. The braġioli was, in fact, one, large beef olive. I tasted this and the filling was homogenous and slightly insipid but still edible.

If I’m waiting so long and putting up with so much though, I expect something much better than this. Thoughtfully, making up for the time, they provided both roast potatoes and chips with the beef olive, even if you’re asked to choose one when ordering. Neither was particularly interesting but, once again, were acceptable.

Luckily the bill didn’t quite manage to hit €35 for both of us. With a bottle of wine factored in, the place won’t break the bank, but I’d have eaten twice as well and in half the time at most pizzerias that fit this price range.

I didn’t quite know whether to pity the people still seated as I walked out or whether they actually like being treated this way. After all, weren’t they the ones who voted this sort of place up in the first place?

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