Ed Eats

Marsaxlokk Waterpolo Club
Triq it-Trunciera,
Marsaxlokk
Tel 7979 2257

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

Growing up in Malta has equipped me to take contradictions in my stride. Whenever there is an apparently unresolvable dichotomy, I shrug and remember the emblem on my passport. All is fine with the world if we just accept that little that ought to make sense actually does.

We’re a Mediterranean country with a diet that is all but Mediterranean. While we should be the healthiest of nations, eating salads and fish and the purest of olive oils, we feast on bread and pasta and embrace diabetes as a national disease we can call our own. Discount supermarkets that sell fruit and veg that’s travelled, usually frozen, across continents are significantly more popular than farmer’s markets that sell seasonal produce.

We actually love anything that is divisive. If I like something, there’s bound to be my counterpart who hates it. You’ve seen it with football and patron saints and politics as big-ticket items and it trickles down to less volatile matters.

Our divisiveness is embedded within that little red and white chromosome that makes us Maltese. If you disagree, well, you’ve proved me right. You can go and sit with half the nation that does so because, statistically, that’s how it will work out.

This makes us remarkably resilient. In the face of all that should collapse, we grin, or rather we grimace, and soldier onwards, grumbling and jostling and elbowing and inching slowly, imperceptibly onwards.

I admire those who have adapted to our way of living and actually turn it to their advantage. These usually cater to half of the population and are content with a state of permanent semi-popularity that would cause Schrödinger to have kittens. The alternative is to barge through life with little regard for opinions, whether they align with one’s own or not.

The latter is brash and useful. A group of us was deciding where to meet for lunch one weekend. It was the fish faction pitted against the meat faction on one axis and the other axis was being torn apart by those who either wanted to take a lazy way out or drive to one of the edges of the island.

The menus are quite typical and include pizza, pasta and such like for starters and fish and meat main courses

The matter was resolved by the brash and the useful. He let us all know that he’d reserved a table for the entire group at Marsaxlokk Waterpolo Club. And that was the end of that. So we all drove to the edge of the Island for a lovely sunny afternoon by the sea.

The restaurant is a single, large room that was already filled with patrons by the time we arrived. It is situated all the way at the edge of the bay so the view across the water is of the power station and all the bits and pieces that jut out from it.

This spawned a conversation that’s been had before. In summary, we sell this nation to foreigners with the promise of 400 days of sunshine a year (we’re prone to hyperbole). Despite this, we can’t figure out a way to derive all our energy from the same blessed sun that we’re so proud of so we insist on burning fossil fuels. Did I mention that we’re a living, breathing contradiction?

The staff is well intended but haven’t quite grasped the notion of service. We tried ordering wine and managed one bottle out of two. We didn’t have enough menus so we passed them around the table. In the end, service turned out to be functional but little else.

The menus are quite typical and include pizza, pasta and such like for starters and fish and meat main courses. There is an attempt to up the game by calling the salmon steak a darne of salmon. A darne is cut perpendicular to the fish and includes the spine. This darne turned out to be the more traditionally lengthwise cut fillet. So much for word games.

My issue with the menu was the pricing. A salmon salad at €13.50 and spaghetti rizzi at €16.90 is pushing it, unless this kitchen had more tricks up its sleeve than a parlour trickster. Oddly, though, the wine is well-priced, so I guess you win some and you lose some if the food turns out right.

While we waited, fresh bread was served and, eventually, some water biscuits and an oddly buttery chickpea dip turned up to keep us going. With a packed restaurant, we knew we’d have a while to wait until our food was served so we nibbled and sipped our wine.

Our food was served with a little bit of a stagger but, within a few minutes, we all had food in front of us. Little attention is paid to the presentation. The salmon is served with a dollop of creamy sauce that appeared to have been ladled on with little care. The fish itself was cooked well but the sauce was an overpowering mix of cream and olives and capers so there was no way of tasting the fish without removing the sauce.

I’d looked at the display of fresh fish and realised that it was quite the mixed bag. There was a large John Dory that had been caught ages ago so its eyes were a sunken bag of matt rubber and, even if there were a couple of fresh fish visible, I wasn’t about to order fish from a kitchen that should have had the sense to remove the sadder fish from display.

I thought I’d play safe and order the spaghetti with mixed seafood in the hope that the seafood would be cooked from frozen.

The first thing I spotted was an abundance of surimi – those reconstituted crabsticks that should never find their way into the kitchen of a fish restaurant. It’s a bit like going to a steakhouse and finding luminous frankfurters next to your fillet.

The rest of the seafood, that included clams and mussels and squid, was fine but was struggling with a sauce that was far too rich and salty to let their flavour do me any favours.

I glanced at the man who’d suggested the place and he was grinning quite smugly and tearing into a massive tagliata. I ventured and innocent, “So what’s it like?” He promptly pulled a chunk out of his plate and passed it on. It looked good and tasted even better than it looked. It was an excellent cut and had been grilled at a high temperature on the outside and was rare on the inside.

The seasoning on top of the beautifully charred meat was just right and the potatoes served on the side were also quite lovely.

It turned out that he’d visited this restaurant a couple of weeks prior to our adventure. He  had ordered the tagliata and returned for more. Only he’d neglected to recommend it to the rest of us. And who’d have thought that the best dish at a waterpolo club in Marsaxlokk would be the steak?

Not all meat had fared as well. One of us had ordered rabbit and was struggling to get the meat off the bone. I asked what it was like and, after a moment of chewing and rumination, was told that it was ‘just about edible’. Where I come from, that’s not exactly an accolade.

I’ve complained enough I suppose and it is probably evident that I won’t be returning to this particular restaurant any time soon. Sure, the tagliata is great, but I have other options for a fantastic steak so I won’t be placing my bets on a single dish, even if it’s been proved consistent. But my absence won’t matter. Everything I disliked about the place is statistically loved by at least half of the population and if I were running a restaurant I’d take those odds.

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