The Terrace
Fortina Spa Resort
Tigné Seafront
Sliema
Tel 2346 0000
Food: 6/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 8/10
Value: 5/10
Overall: 6/10
It’s here. Summer, with its relentlessly oppressive heat, cold beer, smell of tanning products and endless streams of hapless tourists, has just kicked the rest of our weather systems’ frigid backsides. At first, it creeps up gently, toying with us, allowing the occasional spring breeze to fill us with hope. Then it drops the bomb.
I sometimes pity tourists. I watch them pant like a Huskie that’s been tricked into living in a warm climate and picture them a few months before this happened. There they were, looking out of the window of their office in Croydon at the uniformity of grey brick, grey sky, grey drizzle, and grey Ford Fiestas.
A terrible banner ad selling Malta as a destination pops up as they dodge work to look up holidays. The last time I saw an ad promoting Malta on a bus in London, it was so ugly that the blush of embarrassment started somewhere around my knees.
But compared to endless stream of grey, even the ugliness of a Malta banner ad looks appealing. There’s colour and sunshine and happy people who don’t seem to have aged a day since the stock photo was shot in 1984.
So the Croydon denizen books a flight and a hotel room and wonders about airport transfers and day trips and open-top buses to an unpronounceable village at the far edge of the tiny island that once formed part of the endless empire of Britannia.
“Remind me why we let them go?”, asks the wife, as they go through YouTube videos about the top 10 spots to visit in Malta. “I suppose we’ll find out in June,” comes the eerily prophetic response of the cynic that every husband is meant to be.
Well, it’s because there’s too much that looks better in pictures than in real life. The real gems, like the relatively helpful average Maltese person asked for directions by a foreigner, never gets a mention. Neither do the slightly inaccessible gems on the edges of our islands, the ones with unspoilt treks and the unique aesthetic of our garigue ever feature. Its endless beaches and an excellent hospitality industry that wind up making it to the pictures, and this is one way of disappointing punters.
Looks lovely but doesn’t deliver the goods to match the picture
For years now I’ve walked past the restaurant that’s across the road from the Fortina hotel in Sliema. The terrace, with its white, curved edge jutting out over Sliema creek like something out of a seventies sci-if movies looks pretty spectacular. My question was always about what food is actually being fed to the patrons. I imagined the place to be a pricey extension of the hotel itself. I suspected that it is one of those places that could easily make it to an ad that promotes our country as a destination. And this kept me away from it.
But recently the heat got to me. It weakened my resolve and I walked in for lunch. Two people met us at the door and they both asked if we’d placed a reservation, accompanying the question with that pursed lips expression reserved for the run-up to the pleasure that’s to be had turning you back from whence you came.
It turns out there was a single table left. On the terrace, in the sun. The umbrellas only cover around half of the tables and I presume there are plenty of people who would love to sit and eat in the sun. Typically, I’d pick the shade but I didn’t have a reservation and so had no valid claim to a choice.
There were quite a few members of the front of house team and they all did the job of asking if we needed menus, whether we wanted drinks, and whether we’d ordered food. In time this became a little tiresome because it would be more efficient if they actually spoke to each other, but they were all trying to be helpful.
With the exception of one particularly brusque lady, and her stiff impatience could have simply been the reflection of a language barrier, they were all polite at every interaction and, in a functional way, they all strove to keep us comfortable and fed.
We ordered from the list of daily specialities. There was a seafood platter that sounded generous in its variety, and a seafood pot that picked aquatic fauna from a different part of the seabed, so we ordered both, served as main courses. Sharing them, we realised, would be a good way of getting our hands on as many fishy treats as we could. We added a starter to share and settled in.
The starter, their take on Tempura prawn was delivered to our table within a couple of minutes. It’s not quite a tempura but could be considered quite decent as a lightly battered prawn instead. It was served with a hot and sweet sauce on top of a well dressed salad that had wilted a bit and had probably felt better in the morning, but did the trick all the same.
I was seated in a pretty perfect position with my back to the ugliness of Sliema and facing the prettiness of Marsamxett and Manoel Island. Fluffy white clouds in a swatch-book blue sky scraped just three tower cranes in my view. Beneath our table, the pool and pool deck of the hotel hosted tourists, ranging from a smooth, pale pink to crinkly, orange leather. Shot from the right angle, this could be a postcard from the seventies.
We had quite a while to enjoy the views while our main courses were being prepared. This is a good thing. In a location so splendid one would not want to feel rushed. When our main courses made it, we had to rearrange cutlery and crockery to fit the two, rather large dishes, laden as they were with a smorgasbord of sea-dwellers.
In essence, the level of preparation was a stewpot of hits and misses. Soft shell crab, lightly floured and fried, was a little rubbery but enjoyable nonetheless. The tuna tartare tasted dodgy so I stopped at the one tentative bite and left the rest. Squid, served a lovely sauce that included its ink and mild citrus undertones was a little tough. The sauce made up for the texture though. An admittedly easy dish, sea bream tempura was good enough for the two of us to divide it equally into two piles like a couple of toddlers sharing a bag of sweets.
A more inspired and an interesting side note came in the form of a seaweed salad. This makes a welcome change from the typical sides served with a seafood platter. I normally group these into a collective yawn so I was pleasantly surprised.
Just as interesting was the concoction that the seafood pot was served with. A mild-mannered sauce hosted artichoke hearts, gnocchi, broad beans and tiny spuds and these formed the backdrop for the fish itself.
And here lay the disappointment. Langoustines had been cooked to within an inch of edibility and the razor clams had somehow turned to rubber. It felt awful to leave a full plate of what’s one of my favourite bivalve but there was nothing better to do.
We paid a rather handsome €70 for the food. If I split this into what we paid for location and what we paid for food, we wound up inside a rather expensive postcard. Perhaps it is fulfilling its destiny as part of our hospitality. It looks lovely enough to drag me over from whatever miserable corner of the earth I happen to inhabit but doesn’t quite deliver the goods to match the picture.