Mona's Meals | Sunday, 11 January 2009

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Ġanni l-Gћawdxi Hawn

I frequently get queries from British, German and (strange, this one) Indian travellers asking me where they should go eat, where they should avoid, and somewhat a little late - because their booking would already have been made - whether they’ve made a huge mistake in their choice of hotel. I always reply. I’m so altruistic I’m probably up for some kind of papal award and don’t even know it. Or a Gieh ir-Repubblika, now that even La Losco has one.
A few weeks ago, I started getting a lot more queries than usual: Brits who want to get married here and are looking for a restaurant which can handle a ceremony; others who left it till the last minute to book their Christmas and New Year’s meals; a maharaja who wanted a couple of pastizzi flown to India (actually, I’ve made this last one up).
Then one Tracey Essery wrote in, asking for last-minute advice. ‘How did you find out about me?’ I asked her, quite idiotically I thought to myself as I pressed ‘send’, since a website is, after all, available to everyone. She said ‘It’s in the Lonely Planet Book - page 54 says: ‘Mona’s just the kind of in-the-know local we’d want pointing us in the right gastronomic direction - Check out her spot-on restaurant reviews at www.planetmona.com before making dinner plans.’ So we did!’
I almost flew off the sofa, then realised that it was 1am and that rushing out to the nearest Agenda in my age-old Gap sweatshirt, ripped sweatpants and Fit-Flop billows is so not a good look. Contrary to popular belief, I do not swan around in a baby doll and fluffy, heeled slippers.
The next morning I was there getting myself a copy of the third edition. And yes, just as Tracey had said, Carolyn Bain, the author, had put me right in it: a little dot on the international spectrum.
Carolyn is particularly in love with Gozo. On her last visit, she found an apartment in Victoria and enjoyed the ‘village’ life (oh oh - to the Rabtin, Victoria is a city) from her balcony. She enthuses about the little things in Gozo which we take for granted because, you know, they’re just there. Like any good travel writer, she reminds us of the familiar we have forgotten because she sees it through fresh eyes.
I think Gozo is just a marketing exercise waiting to be born. I see two tussling cultural spheres vying for supremacy which, unless fused, will continue to kill each other. On one side are the traditionalists like Victor Galea, doing their fabulous little bit to promote the genuine stuff like naturally-reared animals and organic farming though the Agear foundation ; on the other, there are the famished developers, waiting to rip every bit of land to shreds, driving the price of property down by building too much, hatching more and more flats which nobody wants to stay, let alone live in. Somewhere in the middle, there is the Gozitan business intelligentsia, like the Magro brothers, recognising how to make best use of the traditional while transposing it to 2009 methodology and marketing.
I used to tease everybody I met about the Gozitan ‘character’, if there is one: the goats, the murder of siblings over fields and land, the living and procreating with daughters as if they were wives, until I realised that - and this is scary - fifty per cent of my bestest friends hail from the sister island. And another twenty per cent don’t, but are married or living with a Gozitan (the latter, in sin, obviously).
For islanders, the Gozitans have one up on us Maltese. Actually, they have many, but the one I notice most is that they can take the piss out of themselves and their stereotyped characteristics.
Which is why at Gozitan all the Maltese version of the menu is written in Gozitan. It’s really quite funny; finek not fenek; qasqews for pork. I apologise to my foreign readers but there simply is no translation. Except maybe for tigiega muhxije, which I did not notice on the list.
The owner is as Gozitan as they come. ‘I love him’ a colleague told me, rather bashfully. ‘He is just what I want to see after a mad night out in Paceville. The place is so homely and nice, as is the food.’ The guy really is nice, and welcoming. But there is just one horrible, horrific thing to contend with though before you get to the food: the area.
Paceville, like Patpong in Bangkok, is not restaurant material. Location is key and here, it is rusty and way too big for the keyhole. Paceville is designed for stripping your pockets with rocket fuel, for puking under pavements and for hanging out at the bottle shops getting pissed on alcopops. Actually it was not designed at all but, amoeba-like, it just grew from a little, quiet, seaside place into the behemoth of pulchritude it is today. One that, admittedly, I enjoyed tremendously in my youth.
So Gozitan depends on passing trade, on tourists mostly, who were mad and misinformed enough to book themselves a bed in the area. For this, they should kiss the ground the owner walks on. The Maltese, on the other hand, have spoken, and Gozitan now has his regular local clientele. Like most Gozitans, he manages to supersede all practical difficulties in spite of, rather than because of, where he is.
The restaurant itself ain’t pretty. It’s a badly designed converted garage space, with uncomfortable chairs, a couple of horrendously huge flat-screen tv’s which intrude no matter where you’re sat (on our visit, they were showing women’s darts on EuroSport: by comparison, Gozitan goat breeders look positively Dita Von Tees-ish), pretend-Tiffany lamps, and enough smoke coming out of the open kitchen to choke you.
That said, it also has a wonderful suckling pig oven, fantastic service, a very pretty waitress, a very pretty waiter (although my gaydar ma tharrekx), a nicely-enthusiastic owner and enough policemen visiting them (in Gozitan friendliness) to make you feel super-secure. It also has fantastic food. The fresh cheeselet was dripping whey. The rabbit liver was drenched in honey, seared quickly and cooked perfectly in a way that seals the outside and leaves the insides all soft and gooey. The fried cheeselet was superb, crispy outside and melting inside.
‘What on earth is this?’ I asked TW. ‘Isn’t aiioli a garlic mayonnaise’ I whined, pointing at the orange-red mound of paste. ‘That’s arjoli Mona’ he replied ‘Tomato, bread or broken down galletti, sometimes tuna, garlic, parsley and oil.’ It has, of course, nothing to do with the French version. I’m so lucky to have TW to point these obvious things out to me.
I had the local lamb. Fantastic, lush. Local lamb is a mish-mash of pieces, as far off from New Zealand purple as the country itself is from Gozo. The meat is a milk-pink, the texture like cotton, the bones copious and flat. They brought home-cut chips which TW complained were not crisp enough. There were also patata l-forn which weren’t: I don’t know if they do it differently in Gozo but the real thing is fluffy and crunchy and blackened on top, not baby potatoes in their skin, roasted.
The owner is honest. When TW tried to order the prawns or the calamari, he told him they were frozen. So TW had the topside beef, the ‘lesser’ side of the t-bone (the other side being fillet). It cost him €20, which I thought was slightly over-priced for a cheaper cut of beef. Then I realised (way later, when the bill arrived) that we had not been charged for the cheeselet, or the liver, or the coffees, or the limuncell. I found that quite stunning. If you go along and have so many items knocked off your bill, do let me know. Everybody knows Gozitans have a very well-oiled gossip machine: they probably knew I was on the way the second we left home.
Dessert was limited, as should be if we want to keep the theme, and we had fried imqaret with cinnamon ice-cream (beautiful, smooth) and a couple of pieces of helwa. Simple, yet quite a good rounding up of events.
Bizarrely, this Gozitan has opened a genuine restaurant in the most ungenuine of places. Rather than finding a little farmhouse somewhere and drawing the crowds there, he has decided to go to the masses. But then, he is Gozitan: sharp and very probably, soon to be successful. He’ll have you in there before you could say ‘aqsam il-fliegu hoj’.

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