Ed eats

Cañas y Tapas
St George’s Bay,
St Julian’s
Tel: 2138 0400

Food: 6/10
Service: 4/10
Ambience: 4/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 5/10

Some phrases, idioms and sayings that are still around purely because they have been around for very long, do not have much more than their age to recommend them.

The wine was served quite appallingly by a grumpy man who made a dog’s breakfast of extracting the cork

Starting with the nonsensical ones about having cake and eating it (as opposed to what?) and moving to the anachronistic ones about red sunsets and what best to do with your horses in the morning.

Today we have cars and weather forecasts, thank you very much.

Then there is the one about the chicken and the egg. A witty young man, chauvinistic as all men are until they realise what is actually going on, once told me he was convinced that it was the cock that turned up first.

I am sure he has grown to see the error in his ways and I must find the time to get in touch and ask him about it. In any case, if you really want to know what comes first, order both chicken and egg and see what makes it to your table first.

The answer to this particular conundrum is buried further on in the column. Read it, be enlightened, and buy the T-shirt with answer printed on it.

This week’s column is about a restaurant that proclaims itself to be the ‘ONLY’ (sic, capital letters and all), one of its kind in Malta. The restaurant in question is called Cañas y Tapas in St Julian’s, quite predictably a Spanish tapas place that hogs the spot once occupied by the venerable Fuego.

I never quite remember the couple of evenings that ended up at Fuego, and that is probably because an ancient survival gene kicked in, one that prevents death by embarrassment. What I do recall is that every time I walked past, it was hugely, vastly, popular, heaving with people who were convinced that they could dance salsa or that everyone else was drunk enough to mistake the uncertain gyrations for contest-worthy prancing.

Along comes an international (more like ‘regional’) franchise and the heaven for late-night tomfoolery plays its last track and makes way for the decorators.

I had heard of this change and had driven past the place a few times so there was no issue finding Cañas y Tapas. What worried me is that as long as the place has been open to the public, I have heard absolutely nothing about it.

Usually one hears whispers about new places being excellent, average, underwhelming, or just awful. This was a restaurant shrouded in silence.

We were met at the door by a young woman who asks us which of the three sections we’d like to sit in. The first section is brightly lit, contains a bar and an extensive wine rack, and a couple of vats used for beer fermentation (props in this case, they’re not brewing their own ales).

The third section is an ‘outdoor’ terrace that caters for smokers. The middle section benefits from neither attraction and is thus a limbo that I would imagine is picked last, when the other sections have been filled to bursting.

We were seated in the brightly lit area and delivered a number of menus. The main menus, as is the case across the franchise, come in the form of a large board that verges on the unwieldy because it crams all the items the kitchen serves. The others are mini-menus for wines, cocktails, desserts, and other drinks.

They have attended one class too many at business school and mistook ‘include your customer in the supply chain’ for ‘get your clients to write out their own orders’. A blackboard is supplied. Chalk is, too.

And Miss Waitress instructs diners to place the numbers that correspond to the item on the menu in one column, and write ‘M’ for medium and ‘R’ for large. This makes it uncannily appropriate for a Chinese restaurant. Only this one is Spanish.

Chalk in hand, we read through the menu and then obeyed the suggestion at the very top – order five to six tapas and these should easily feed two people.

I tend to drink local wines when abroad or at themed restaurants, with obvious exceptions like the UK, so we added an uninspiring but inexpensive Palomino from Andalucía.

This was served quite appallingly by a young and grumpy man who ripped the entire capsule off the bottle, made a dog’s breakfast of extracting the cork in shreds, and pouring my glass first. It does not take years of training to learn how to serve wine.

All one needs to do is eat out a couple of times and pick up the right cues to achieve an acceptable knowledge of the ritual. It won’t make a sommelier of anyone but it will yield the basics.

I love the way tapas are served as they are prepared. This means you always get food fresh from the kitchen. Japanese food is served in the same way unless the restaurants have been overly Westernised and it is yet another reason for me to like it. Happily, this lack of sequence is followed by Cañas y Tapas.

We had ordered sautéed eggs and potatoes served with chicken, caramelised onion and bell peppers, the same dish served with lacon (cooked ham) and manchego cheese, albondigas (pork and veal meatballs in a tomato sauce), their ‘ultimate’ combination of hams, sausage, and cheeses, a dish of prawns in olive oil and garlic, and a final concoction of grilled mushrooms with more garlic.

The vampires would have to pick another night if they were to turn either of us.

The meats and cheeses were served first, and after we waited for a while for bread and oil, thought that these were not served with the dish. When we had started to pick at the board a lady who we hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting noticed the omission.

She was really polite, making up for the shortcomings of her colleagues, and dashed off to make amends, returning with a basket of lovely bread and twisty bread sticks and a very good olive oil.

All the items on the board were excellent and even nicer with fresh bread and olive oil.

By this time other dishes started to make it to our table. The albondigas were very tender and quite tasty, served very simply with a spicy tomato sauce. Even more simply prepared were the shrimps in oil, garlic and chilli, also quite tasty but unremarkable. Slightly less memorable was the dish of mushrooms.

Then the two dishes based on sautéed eggs were placed on our table. I thought the description sounded like a Spanish tortilla that is the potato and egg staple of the nation. This was more like the formidable Portuguese Francesinha.

Pale potato chips, shallow-fried, are covered in a very tender omelette and topped with whatever other ingredients one has specified. The first proved that both the chicken and the egg can make it to the finish line together, putting that old adage to bed for good.

The second dish made me wish I were hung over. It is oily, salty, warm, tasty and filling.

That gap in your body and soul on a Sunday morning when you have had to make an enthusiastic presence at two weddings on Saturday night has the precise dimensions of the sautéed egg and potato with lacon and manchego.

I am very happy to see that they are open seven days a week. Starting with breakfast.

The recommendation on the menu was quite correct. Six tapas had been much more than enough. I made every effort to finish everything off but even my industrial capacity for food was no match.

The bill was not surprising at €55 for the lot and I believe we could have eaten much less and paid much less had we known what we were in for.

Driving back home, I had scarcely shifted into second gear before I passed by Hugos Tapas. Not only is Cañas y Tapas not the ‘ONLY’ one of its kind, it is a stone’s throw away from its closest match.

It might have a more ‘authentic Spanish’ feeling to it but it does not quite match the food quality or presentation that Hugos Tapas consistently serves, albeit at a price tag to match.

I will be back to Cañas y Tapas for breakfast but I suspect I will satisfy night-time cravings for tapas at Hugos Tapas.

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