The Brew
The Strand
Sliema
Tel: 2703 0398

Food: 3/10
Service: 4/10
Ambience: 6/10
Value: 5/10
Overall: 4.5/10

The world is divided into two unequal portions. A large number of people would slow down when driving past a traffic accident and take a peek. A smaller number won’t. They’ll glance quickly at the cars involved to make sure it’s not a family member and drive past without a second thought.

For the most part, I belong to the smaller, possibly more callous, division. I’m not interested in twisted metal and cracked plastic bumpers and I don’t quite need to see the face of someone filling out a collision form.

But we all have our morbid fascination with the unpleasant, our version of the intimate contact of vehicle bumpers. Or more than one. Since you want to sleep tonight, I’ll stick with the one that’s safe for print within the sanctity of this newspaper. My unhealthy curiosity lies with unlikely places to eat.

Since I don’t look at traffic accidents, I don’t know what the possible reward is. It could be that those who slow down to a crawl, holding up traffic and causing people like me to curse their souls to within inches of the jaws of Cerberus, know that once in a while there is this genie involved in an accident. This mythical creature, condemned to eternal life, has bought a small Toyota and drives around our islands hoping for a collision. The person who watches for longest is granted three wishes. I’ll never be certain about this so don’t quote me.

But I know what my fascination has in store. It has led me to misery and to joy in almost equal measure, so, like the inveterate gambler, I keep trying, knowing there’s a chance I’ll come out on top. My forays have taken me to little gems like the Brown Jug bar in Gżira, where I was fed the most delicious of rabbit for lunch. It has taken me Joseph ir-Relax’s bar in Santa Venera and his eternally bubbling crucible of onions in their concoction of curry and other mysterious spices, a ladle of which ends up in your ftira with fried farm animals.

It also had me wish I’d chosen traffic accidents. I’ve been suckered into meals that I could have done without. The ones that my mind just won’t forget, like my foolishness of trying a cheap Ita­lian restaurant in Vancouver or ordering a steak at a steakhouse franchise in Croydon. Sometimes I’m just asking for it, but that’s the nature of these unhealthy habits. You know it can’t be pretty but you poke at it just the same.

There were two ways it could have gone with The Brew in Sliema. I’d been attracted by the idea of a meal in a pub that brews its own beer for quite a while. Brewing beer takes a while to fine tune, as does a new kitchen, so I gave it some time to settle down before taking the plunge.

It was the heat that drove me there. I needed cold, cold beer and lunch on a Saturday afternoon. I was driving past The Brew and espied an unbelievably conve­nient parking spot. My curiosity would be satisfied.

If you’re pricing linguine at €17 a dish and can’t cook them, take them off the menu

The signs are not encouraging. The need to theme the place and make it feel like a franchise is tangible. Menus are cut into the shape of a beer glass and are thick with page upon page of food and drink choices. The same kitchen turns out starters like a pepata di cozze, pasta dishes, grills, burgers, fish, soups, salads, and sausages by the metre.

For a restaurant named and themed around beer, I was surprised at the drinks list. There are 17 pages of wines, six pages of cocktails, spirits, and ‘super premium’ spirits, and one page of beers – 10 of the usual suspects and six house brews. These are ostensibly brewed on site and there are huge copper kettles inside to confirm this.

The terrace is mercifully shaded and has those devices that spray an almost continuous mist to help cool you down, so we picked a table at the edge of terrace that’s closest to the street for a view of the sea across four lanes of traffic.

I liked the idea of grilled sausage to go with beer but these start with a metre to share, and I was the only one enthused. So I picked their chipotle, bacon and cheese burger because it pro­mised everything I needed at the same time. Meanwhile, the better half was losing her mind. It might have been the heat. It might have been a moment of temporary confusion. Whatever it was, it led her to choose the linguine pescatore. At a brewhouse.

I looked at the house brews for inspiration. There’s a pilsener and four ales, ranging from one they call honey to a dark one, with a bonus in the form of their own ginger ale. I started with half a pint of honey ale to keep me going until I’d order my second with the food. Placing an order was troublesome. There were three occupied tables that afternoon and two staff members to handle all of us. They walked around, did stuff, checked their phones, and did an excellent job of avoiding eye contact with us.

Eventually I got up and chased one around until I could ask him to take our orders. Which, a while later, he did. And to his credit, he returned with a bottle of water and my half-pint quite quickly. The beer is, as craft beers are, unfiltered. It has a mild-mannered nose followed by floral motifs and an unstructured mouth feel, winding up with a pleasantly bitter but rather abrupt finish. I could do more of this beer and it ratcheted my enthusiasm with an audible click.

I’d finished the beer by the time our food had arrived, even if I’d sipped it and savoured it quite slowly. This meant a pretty long wait for our food but it also meant I got to my second beer just in time for food. This time, against the advice of the menu, I ordered the dark beer.

According to its description, “On­ly a true connoisseur can understand this beer”. Well, I didn’t need to understand it because I was doing all the talking. It is very dark, intensely hoppy, mildly carbonated and pleasantly dry. It is surprisingly detailed, with dark chocolate, rich fruit notes, and bitter and sustained finish. It’s no Dark Sister but I’d pick this again.

My burger looked the part, stacked in a neat tower that had been carefully arranged to look like it does in the pictures. The patty is quite lean and overly minced but the sauce is good, the salad fresh, and the bacon limp. We haven’t quite understood the value of crisping bacon properly and I’ve given up on this. When I want crisp bacon in a burger I prepare it myself. The chips were quite terrible, just like the ones you get at a festa truck when they know there isn’t enough light for you to see what you’re about to hurt yourself with. I tried two of them and left the rest.

All three of the marks scored for food were thanks to the burger. The linguine were an unmitigated disaster. The attempt to season the dish with lemon did nothing to it, and the mussels tasted of the water that seeps out of a defrosting freezer. There was octopus and a prawn and some clams that were a notch above the mussels but that’s not really praise for them.

We mentioned this to the girl who took our dishes when we were done and she simply acknow­ledged this with a nod.

So, bruised but not broken, I paid €45 for the beer and the food and the mist and awful music. If you’re pricing linguine at €17 a dish and can’t cook them, take them off the menu. Give us more ways to sausage instead, because I’m sure the grill is fine.

The beer is good though, and I’m curious about the four I didn’t try, so I’ll quite likely be back. Only this time I’ll go on a full stomach.