Ed eats

Henry J Beans
Corinthia Hotel
St George’s Bay
Tel: 2370 2694

Food: 6/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

I have said this before, perhaps a little too indirectly for some to understand it. If you know the drill, feel free to skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.

This felt like Henry J Beans a couple of World Cups ago

This column is intended to be an unbiased (within normal human limits) review of establishments that exchange food for money.

This means that there is no minimum level of service or price or complexity that must be met for this column to turn its attention to an eatery.

This particular edition, for instance, deals with a very informal diner and is thus compared to other informal diners within the same price bracket. If I were to compare it to Pied a Terre on Charlotte Street in London, for instance, I would have to score the food very low and would be very unfair in doing so.

Fulfil your promises, dear restaurateur, and benefit from higher ratings.

This also means, and this is what drove me to write this most rambling of prologues, that I cannot accept invitations to restaurants.

If I am invited, or somehow turn up with advance notice, the way I am treated will most likely not be an indication of what is typical for that restaurant.

As a result it would obtain an unjustly high score, simultaneously tipping any credibility this column may have into the grease trap.

And yet I occasionally receive e-mails from owners of restaurants (or people acting on their behalf) that invite me to dinner.

Some are polite about it. Others go, “Seeing that you’ve reviewed Restaurant ABC, why not visit my place called Restaurant DEF for a better experience?”

Quite recently, I received a rather cheeky PR brief, with place and time of an official launch, a request to ‘cover’ the event, and instructions to bring my own photographer along. Seriously?

I am afraid this column is not a conduit to free culinary PR. I also take most shots myself (this edition being a particularly poor example – I resorted to using my phone) or I’d have to go out to dinner with a photographer in tow and that is a rather large clue about the purpose of the dinner.

That is enough about the nature of this column for the time being, and this is where I suggested you’d skip to – the bit about the place being reviewed.

I have not been to Henry J Beans for a while and there is no real reason for this other than coincidence and circumstance.

It has slipped my mind as I buzz around looking for different places to discover and, had I not been in the area at supper time I could very well have spent more time without popping by.

I remember liking the place back when it first opened its doors to an unsuspecting Maltese public. We had little by way of traditional American diners back then, and coming to think of it, we still have little that follows its style today.

While the ‘burgers, ribs and grill’ formula is abundant, this place follows all the way through with a complete theme to it.

The décor makes sure you do not miss the point, with American advertising plastered all over the walls and a menu that drives the point home.

Curiously enough, the franchise has no American heritage. It was born in the UK a couple of decades ago and has a number of restaurants here and there with the US being, quite naturally, an exception.

Selling diners to the Americans should replace all the other alternative expressions for providing that which one already has in abundance.

The restaurant has not changed much since my first visit and this is not a badthing since the theme is quite timeless if one were to consider the brevity of America’s dining tradition.

A large bar occupies the left of the restaurant while some of the wall space is lined with comfy booths. A DJ booth in the middle of the restaurant serves to further break up the large space into smaller bits. The result is that, no matter where you sit, you are always in a cosy spot that doesn’t feel lost in a large space.

On the night we visited I did not have much more than an hour available for dinner. I hoped that the service would be as rapid as I remember it to be.

We were met at the door by a cheerful young lady who offered a number of seating options. At a diner, I pick a booth.

Onto the upholstered bench I slithered and, snugly seated, considered the menus she’d delivered. Very little has changed. Their all-time favourite dishes are on the menu, with classics like wings, ribs and combos of both rubbing shoulders with burgers and grilled steak.

The familiarity was uncanny. Even their hot dog is still called ‘Walk the dog’. Had there been my old-time favourite ‘The NY Strip’ I’d have sworn that the menu has not changed one bit since my last visit.

Lest my joy be mistaken for disappointment I must point out that I was relishing the memory. This is not silver-service, Michelin-starred, fine-dining where innovation and surprises are demanded.

In here one enters for the warm duvet of familiarity, the tender embrace of your favourite comfort food served very quickly, the cossetting cockpit of the booth taking away all desire for novelty, forgiving you for choosing the exact same dish every time you visit.

The lights are all shaded, the music at the right volume, the serving staff cheerful and attentive, and there is a sport I cannot comprehend on TV. Perhaps it is baseball, I decided, knowing I had no leg to stand on.

In any case, this felt like Henry J Beans a couple of World Cups ago. I ordered a pint of lager. And a burger with mushrooms and cheese.

I had not expected to be joined in my choice of food and drink and was not surprised when my rather pedestrian choice of food was countered by a mojito and a short-rack of beef ribs. I almost considered that too fancy.

Worried that the 8 oz burger (that’s almost 227gr, says wolframalpha) would not suffice, I ordered Voodoo wings since they sounded like they’d be the real deal in terms of heat. And I refer not to the temperature at which they are served.

Within minutes the wings were served. There is no perceptible heat to the sauce but the wings do the trick and a couple more minutes was all it took for my hands and face to look like I’d eaten a chunk out of a living creature.

Perhaps that’s what they mean by Voodoo. The girl who had taken our orders must have seen this before because she’d brought plenty of equipment to help me clean up the mess.

The burger was as large as I remembered it. The melted cheese and mushrooms and the sauce they picked were just lovely. The patty itself had been slightly overdone so what juices it started out with had travelled out of the burger and into the frying pan.

And yet it was perfectly edible so eat it I did. The chips tasted like the oil they’d been fried in had seen better days so I left those instead. The wings I’d started with more than made up for any gaps in my stomach.

The short rib looked very fatty to me and this is what one presumably orders it for. This part of the cow is very fatty and its closest neighbour is where we obtain the rather fatty (hence delicious) rib-eye steak.

Apart from the topmost layer that was a little tough, the rest of the meat was succulent, full of flavour and parted from the bone with no effort at all.

We paid just over €40 for the meal and walked out exactly an hour after we’d arrived without ever feeling rushed. This is probably where fast food ends and informal dining starts and the price and the quality are tuned to match.

And while I am not quite sure where the franchise got its American credentials from, I am quite happy to close an eye to its origins as long as it is quick to deliver what I am used to, with a smile.

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