Adesso
South Street,
Valletta
Tel: 2124 0460

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

There’s a particular clock in a particular house that, according to the late Mr Pratchett, has a face but no hands. It does have a single pendulum, however, and this swings without end, slicing rashers of time from the bacon of eternity. He was poetic that way, even dealing with the insignificance of humanity when faced with the mind-boggling vastness of forever.

The passage that I’ve loosely paraphrased resurfaced from whatever memory nook it had been hiding in while I was sitting at a table at Adesso in Valletta. It’s a restaurant I’d heard good things about but that I never quite got round to trying out. Somehow, the appropriate time just never came calling. While sitting there, I noticed the irony.

The restaurant is named after this very moment. Or the next moment. As long as it is in the present. I overheard a waitress give the Wifi password to the men at a table not more than a foot away from ours and, loosely translated, suggests that one is meant to seize the moment. The decoration consists almost exclusively of clock faces without hands. Large clocks on the wall, small ones on little ledges tell no time. They just sit there and look pretty. Clearly, whoever is running the place is motivated by the present.

The menus are printed daily and dated, further reinforcing the notion of time. I presumed that the dentici that was available as a speciality not listed on the menu had been caught after the day’s menu had been printed.

Opening with a tian of white crab and compressed cucumber with an oyster beignet, Lardo di Colonnata, saffron and oyster mayonnaise is one way of seizing my attention, and the menu did just that. It is one of those laboriously described lists that draws ingredients from a broad culinary vocabulary and conjures up unlikely and enticing combinations with them.

So I took the time to pore over every item, making what I thought would have been my final selection, and changing it all over again as another dish fought for my attention. In the end I decided I’d start with the prettily named bons bons of fish, roasted scallops, raisin and caper purée, and brown butter hollandaise.

I wasn’t the only one faced with this dilemma. The better half was just as undecided and kept changing her mind until the very last se­cond, changing her order mid-sentence as she re­layed it to our host. She picked the crab tian that had launched the menu, a starter that won a very close battle with the mussel and mushroom dashi broth.

For main course, I picked the day’s catch – the dentici that was to be served with an orange and prawn bisque – while the pork cheek expert chose the pork jowl, slow cooked for 12 hours, and served with a celeriac and black truffle purée.

This all sounded great, if a little dated. I’m tired of overly verbose menus but they’re still enjoying popularity in select spots around our islands. It also made me wonder why I was reading what sounded like a brasserie menu and eating on plain, wooden tables with pretty regular cutlery in a restaurant that could have been perfectly au courant a decade ago. ‘Time out of joint’ sprang to mind this time, in the form of the Philip K. Dick novel, and not the line from Hamlet, but perhaps I was reading too much into the whole time theme.

The lady who took our orders, very helpful if sometimes overly present, knew the food and the wine quite well. She’s one of those front-of-house powerhouses who takes pride in what she does and forms an essential part of the Adesso experience. She served bread that was freshly baked, olive oil of the extra virgin variety, and olives that not only came all the way from Sicily but were also handpicked. Whoever wrote the menu had also written her script, and wasn’t leaving any adjectives to chance.

The bread was lovely, the oil quite tame, and the black olives were superb. We nibbled at the trio and sipped a Loire valley Sauvignon and waited for a good while as spa music played in the background.

As we waited, the table next to ours was done with their meal and our host asked them to leave a rating on Tripadvisor. They seemed delighted to do so and praised their meal very highly, so they had every reason to leave a positive note.

Later on, with this interaction in mind, I went to look up the restaurant on that awfully misleading site. It ranks highly in terms of Valletta restaurants but is preceded by a tiny sandwich place that quite possibly is more insistent on pa­trons leaving reviews than the staff at Adesso are. So much for trusting democratic reviews.

Our starters took a little over half an hour. We’d arrived quite early and shared the restaurant with just two other tables, but now the place was filling up quite nicely so I could imagine the strain on the kitchen.

The menu is inspired and the kitchen very capable

The presentation of the dishes is attractive, meticulous and highly detailed, with a skilful arrangement of food and fresh microherbs so that your imagination is the first to be served. The spheres that made up the bons bons were crisp on the outside and richly packed with moist fish inside, perfect when dipped in the tiny, caper-shaped dabs of raisin and caper purée. Clever, very clever.

The scallop had unfortunately suffered a timing issue and had almost gone cold by the time it made it into my mouth, but this wasn’t stopping me because, bar the temperature, this was a mighty fine way to the delicious bivalve.

Perhaps even more interestingly presented was the crab, deftly stuffed into a lengthwise slit in a cucumber and topped with the oyster beignet. I managed to sneak a taste and I found the cucumber to be a little overpowering. This is unusual for such a mildly-mannered vege­table, but then crab is even more delicate. The sauce was, however, quite the sensation, so all cucumber sins were promptly forgiven.

Another course meant another wait, and an even longer one this time. I’m not one to complain about time, particularly at dinner, but then I did have a bunch of clocks all around me. Perhaps this is why they have no hands.

And, once again, when the food was served the wait was justified. My fish, filleted and served with a beautifully zesty prawn bisque, had been oven finished to perfection, so it was firm on the outside and gave way to the slightest pressure when torn apart with my fork. Little mounds of quinoa and kale added a healthy colour and texture to the dish. On the side, we had a generous portion of double-cooked baby potatoes that were of the addictive sort, and an overly cheesy gratin that threatened to take over all the flavour from anything we were eating.

Across the table, dark clouds were gathering. The pork jowl, a long strip of meat from just beneath the cheek, had been slow cooked and served with an unusually mild truffle sauce. I knew that silent brooding. She’s met her match. Someone had finally found a better way of preparing bits of a pig’s face. I tried a generous forkful and, at risk of life and limb, admitted that she’d been bested.

I didn’t have room for dessert, tempting as the selection was, so I paid the bill for just under €60 each. It’s no secret to anyone who has travelled beyond our shores that we are routinely overcharged for food, and this is a little steep.

Admittedly, the menu is in­spired and the kitchen very capable, but the décor and the ambience are not done up to match. Maybe now’s the time to spruce things up a little. After all, that pendulum waits for no man.

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