Ed eats

Il Vecchio Forno
27, Eucharistic Congress Road,
Mosta
Tel: 2142 1461

Food: 7/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 6/10
Value: 9/10
Overall: 7/10

Some time ago I was roped into a conversation about wine bars. I am never too keen on being forced to express an opinion about wine bars because the vast majority of people I know are particularly fond of them and I’d hate to have to state what I dislike about them for fear of pointing out something they hadn’t picked up so far.

The bill for €35 really put it all into perspective

If a word from me disturbs an ounce of enjoyment during their next night out at a wine bar I will be to blame for that.

Thinking about it later I realised that, as usual, the problem lies with me and not most wine bars so I will go ahead and complain anyway.

I have never been too happy to sit at a table and consume a bottle of wine that I pick from a menu that in all probability contains none of my favourites.

If I am putting up with a hastily drawn-up wine menu, then at least I’d like to eat something proper. And a random collection of cheeses on a board is not my idea of a meal.

When I want to enjoy good wine I buy some and take it home with me. When I want a good meal I go to a good restaurant. And a good restaurant has, by definition, a decent enough wine menu to make my meal all the more special.

The long and short of this is that I am not as sociable as one must be to compromise on wine for the sake of spending time in the company of those who are prepared to.

Most wine bars I have visited tend to have an agreement with two wine suppliers – one local winery and one importer – for the exclusive provision of all wines and this critically limits the selection available. I know there are a few owners of the better places who might read this and indignantly object to that statement.

You know who you are and you should be pleased to know you form part of a small group of people who actually like wine more than profit.

Well done.

Ultimately wine is a creation that must lead to enjoyment and the very definition of enjoyment is as personal as it gets.

If you are happy adding lemonade to your glass of Mateus Rosé and the combination puts a smile on your face, then I am happy to see you enjoy it.

If you are miserable that the ’95 Palmer you’ve just opened has deposited too much of its tannin and wistfully hold the empty bottle up to the light to demonstrate your disappointment, then I share your pain too (I am allowed the occasional personal jab). To each her own, I love to say.

Luckily, there is a small selection of spots scattered around the islands that have understood that good food and good wine can be a happily married couple.

Also lucky is the variety of prices these manage to offer. At the higher end of the spectrum, good food and good wine nestle snugly on the menus of restaurants that will not let you go without relieving your Louis Vuitton purse of at least three digits.

On the lower end of the spectrum there is a very small selection of places that serves a reasonable spread and a reasonable bevy of wines at an appropriately reasonable price.

If I want to head out for aquick pizza, enjoy a decent wine chosen from a decent list and pay less than €50 for two people my options are narrowed even further.

Residents of Mosta will have discovered Il Vecchio Forno, one of the few places that manages to be perfectly reasonable. The place is a stone’s throw away from the massive Mosta dome that I will not dare comment about again.

The last time I joked about it, some neighbour or other of the venerable structure missed the humour and wrote to berate me for my disrespect.

As the name implies, the site was a bakery at some point in its history and the tradition remains in the form of a wood-fired oven used to bake pizza, piadine and other pastry-based meals.

There is a valiant attempt at making the interior look and feel authentically ancient and, while the place is mostly comfortable and welcoming, it falls short of being properly cosy.

We were met at the door by a smiling young lady who led us to our table and provided us with menus and an extensive wine menu. The menus make the best of the wood oven and are biased towards pizza and piadina-style cooking.

There is also the obligatory platter – very well priced when compared to what I am accustomed to paying – and a few salads to keep everyone happy.

The menu, the cheerfully burning wood oven, and the name ‘Il vecchio forno’ itself all put mein the mind of a pizzeria. Yet a look at the wine menu revealsan extent very unusual for a pizzeria.

The list goes on and on, never really going into any depth for any region but managing to span quite the globe quite effectively keeping prices to a minimum.

It is like a wine merchant took as many Ryanair flights as he could and brought back the least pricey way to represent every place he visited. Italian reds peak at a couple of Barolos and even an Amarone but never hit the €50 mark.

I was happy to find an inexpensive Fiano from Campania and, priced at €18, was among the higher priced wines on this menu. I am quite taken by Planeta’s Fiano, the superb Cometa, and was hoping for a baby version of this. It wasn’t quite as special but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless.

The wood oven almost dictated that I should choose a pizza and I picked the one with anchovies on it, swapping out regular mozzarella for the one made of buffalo milk.

When I heard “I’ll have a chicken wrap” from the other side of the table I pretended I was alone and did all I can to disassociate myself from the culprit.

Then I remembered my ‘To each her own’ maxim and swung back into the conversation like nothing had ever gone amiss.

The chicken wrap is not quite a chicken wrap. More appropriately described as a piadina,the pastry is ultra-thin andoven-baked.

The interior is as expected of a chicken-containing pastry, with tender chicken and the obligatory bell-pepper. It was consumed and followed by happy noises, so I suppose it fulfilled its raison d’être.

My pizza had a lovely thin base that had been expertly cooked through before it went down the route to crisp and brittle. The toppings were generous and of good quality so I attacked the pizza and didn’t stop until the only evidence of its existence would need forensics.

It wasn’t the best pizza I’d ever tasted but it did have plenty to recommend it.

The bill for €35 really put it all into perspective.

In an era of hybrids, where cars whizz around with electric motors wanting to grow into sewing machines, where compact cameras want to grow into objects of desire for Ridley Scott and where mobile phones make a secretary redundant, I am not surprised that a pizzeria wants to morph into a wine bar. Or the other way around.

And to be quite honest, I am very happy with this sort of thinking becoming more pervasive because I like having my pizza (sorry cake) and eating it, I like having my wine and drinking it, and doing so in one place makes so much sense.

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