Pepe Nero Lebanese Fusion
Triq tal-Ibraġ
Swieqi
Food: 7/10
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 5/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7/10
The era of the concept restaurant is over. To be fair, it should never have started. The way I see it, you either have a fantastic kitchen that drives discerning diners to your restaurant or you’re depending on a gimmick. And most times I’ve seen ‘concept’ restaurants, they’ve been gimmicks designed to divert attention away from a dreadfully boring or simply incapable kitchen.
Once I spoke to a man who claimed to have a fantastic concept. He said they planned to open a small pizzeria where diners could go and, well, eat pizza. The other option was ordering in advance and collecting a takeaway pizza to eat at home. I sat there and waited for the big idea. It wasn’t forthcoming. That was his concept – an eat-in pizzeria that also did takeaway. Now had he mentioned this five decades ago, the notion would have been novel, but this is the 21st century.
Almost every idea that promotes convenience and laziness has been taken because the market is either busy or lazy (or both). Gratuitous convenience, different ways of ordering food (like when iPads at table were a thing), unusual crockery (hooray for salad in Mason jars), the gastropubs (which were either fancy bars serving snacks or snooty restaurants with a beer list), and other such ‘concepts’ that did nothing to remarkably improve my dining experience should go the way of the dodo, and I rejoice a little when another one bites the dust.
On the border, often quite literally, lies the notion of fusion kitchens. On the one hand, I think that every kitchen has been influenced by another, especially by eating habits from other countries. So, if you think about our kitchen being a melting pot of the most boring that the Mediterranean has to offer, it is a fusion kitchen.
The other side of the same story is the quest for authenticity and origin. This team argues the ethnicity of a cuisine should be respected, allowing the variations within that cuisine to deliver variety. If you’ve eaten vine leaves stuffed with rice and meat, you might have called them dolmas depending on where you ate them. The dish changes from the Balkans through Greece (where they’re also called yemistos) and Turkey, to where Persia ought to be, across all of North Africa, and even into central Asia. If I were to take this an add a Maltese twist to it, is it still the same dish?
Fusion cooking usually brings two kitchens together, celebrating the synergies that occur in the areas where the two styles complement or contrast each other. I suppose it is a notion that, when executed respectfully, can retain relevance for a good, long while.
One element, possibly there at the inception of fusion dining, that I do get is Westernisation. I get it because I live in the West and I’m used to certain flavours, textures and combinations of ingredients. We’re not used to glutinous and gelatinous textures, for instance, and as a result they are textures that haven’t successfully travelled here from Asia where they are widely used. It might be the most practical of justifications for intersecting kitchens but it is a valid starting point.
An abridged version of all I’ve written so far went on in my head while waiting for the traffic lights to favour me at the intersection that was known for hosting Jessie’s Bar, just before turning into Ibraġ. The site that was Jessie’s Bar then became Pepe Nero, a restaurant I quite enjoyed. Waiting at the lights I saw that they’d changed Pepe Nero into Pepe Nero Lebanese Fusion. “The era of the concept restaurant is over” went that little part of my brain that’s on a permanent war-path.
The food is prepared with love and excellent ingredients and the service is warm and welcoming
Then the other bit kicked in, the 98 per cent of my brain that thinks of food all the time, and it told me I just had to try it out. Which I did with alacrity and enthusiasm.
The restaurant was vacant when we visited mid-week. The man who greeted us is everything you want at a restaurant – he is welcoming, polite, and the right kind of cheerful. There was a young lady there that night as well, and I imagine she’s learning the ropes, so our man did the lion’s share of seeing to us.
The menu is what I’d expect of a Lebanese restaurant, with not a single dish that I’d associate with food from outside the region. I was pleased with this – I wasn’t quite after the dilution that we often get with fusion. My issue was that I wanted to taste absolutely everything. The closest one gets to a broad sample is the mixed grill, that includes meat and fish to represent practically everything that can be grilled.
But the notion of mezzes is what I associate Lebanese food with. I’d be happy to pay a fixed price and have a non-stop train of tiny dishes that could introduce me to as much of the menu as possible. Instead, we ordered four mezzes and a single main course to share. We ordered practically at random because every single item sounded incredibly tempting, particularly if you like Middle Eastern dishes.
The first to make it to our table was some fried pitta and a couple of sauces to dip in while we waited for our food to be prepared in the open kitchen. I love the idea of watching a chef work, and this to me is the focal point of Pepe Nero. Plenty has been done to turn the place into a welcoming space but it somehow didn’t work for me. The lighting, the music you normally try to tune out inside a lift, and the overall darkness don’t quite come together the way I imagine they were intended.
Here’s a spoiler. The food is mostly good and sometimes excellent. With food that good, I can only blame the ambience of the space itself for the fact that the place was not filled to capacity that night.
The baba ghanoush is lively, with citrus zest and fresh mint, toasted pine nuts, plenty of almonds, garlic, chopped tomato and bell pepper. There isn’t that charred aubergine skin that usually predominates the aroma, and it feels like a summer salad. Unusual for a baba ghanoush but really quite lovely.
With it, our kibbeh were served. They’re warm and simple, as the street food should be. The outside, a compacted layer of durum wheat, is crisp and stuffed with minced meat and pine nuts. There’s a definite presence of cumin and a fragrance of other spices that blend into that magical potion that a good ras el hanout usually is. A portion of kibbeh includes four of them so I quickly realised that, if I were to get to the end of all we’d ordered, I’d need to pace myself.
Then our Arayes were served, and it takes generous to the next rung on the ladder. Two pittas had been stuffed with kafta and folded in two before being grilled. There’s a logistical issue here – how does one use a fork and knife to keep what’s a very crisp pitta in check? One doesn’t. One uses one’s fingers. It’s in a very good cause.
We opted for the spinach fatayer – think of a qassata that’s stuffed with spinach and onions and lemon. To me, the undisputed king of this dish remains the eponymous Fatayer in Gżira, but these come a close second.
The only disappointing dish of the night was the sharhat bagar mtafa, a dish of sliced beef that’s grilled and served with coriander, garlic, lemon juice and rice topped with sautéed mushrooms. Everything in the dish is lovely except the meat – a cheap cut that was too chewy to consume so there it stayed. We’d also ordered tabbouleh as a side dish and it was excellent.
We paid €50 for the meal which, for the quality and quantity of food is probably just about right. I’d love to see a mezze approach baked into the menu, as it were, so that diners can sit for a while and sample small quantities of all the lovely flavours.
Maybe something needs to be done to the atmosphere to make the time there a little more pleasant but my chief concern about the place was completely done away with. I’d expected a gimmick because of the word ‘fusion’ and Pepe Nero is no such thing.
The food is, for the most part, prepared with love and excellent ingredients and the service is warm and welcoming so I can’t wait to go back for more.