With a failure rate of around 90%, the restaurant business must be around the toughest and most cut-throat the island has to offer. Yet it remains among the most popular among budding entrepreneurs. RAPHAEL VASSALLO talks to food critics about our homegrown recipe for disaster
Critics and connoisseurs rarely share the same opinions when it comes to what constitutes a good meal out. This is perhaps only to be expected, considering that food appreciation, by definition, will always be a matter of personal taste. But on one aspect of the local restaurant landscape, Malta’s leading culinary pundits appear to agree: there are simply too many restaurants out there, and too few which have gone into the business for the right reasons.
Asked what advice it would give to anyone planning on opening a new restaurant in Malta, The Definitive(ly) Good Guide – which has produced definitive restaurant guidebooks for the past decade – had only one word to say: “Don’t”.
“The failure rate of restaurants is something like 90%, so it’s a fairly high risk business. It requires a fair amount of capital to start a good restaurant, besides being a very demanding business to be in. There are a lot easier and safer ways to make money if that is the motivation; and if the motivation is that one enjoys cooking, do it for friends!”
Elsewhere, Mona Farrugia – food and travel writer, editor of planetmona.com, as well as MaltaToday’s resident restaurant critic – agrees almost to the letter.
“Don’t,” she likewise said when asked the same question. “There is no money in it. Working in kitchens is exhausting, your family life will be inexistent, your social life even more. If you want to make money, be an investor: don’t be a chef. If you want to make even more money, with little investment and absolutely no knowledge, open yet another ‘Chinese’...”
Quantity over quality And yet, most would argue that local restaurants have in the main got better, not worse, in recent years. According to the Guide, “there have been considerable improvements over the past nine to 10 years; however there are still some problems with consistency. Top restaurants are now achieving high standards, and we like to think that the Guide has contributed to ensuring that good restaurants receive the custom they deserve.”
Even Mona concedes a degree of improvement, but argues that several restaurateurs still tend to miss the wood for the trees.
“In their majority, restaurants are now paying a little more attention to design, but sadly not to the sourcing of the ingredients. The kitchens are usually packed with mixes in bags, frozen items and imported meat and vegetables. Pastry chefs are a rarity instantly absorbed by the 5-star hotels. We produce more, but it’s mostly generic. ‘Maltese cuisine’ has stopped developing, and it’s a chicken-and-egg situation: what came first? A lack of local cuisine leading to a shortfall in food culture, or a lack of food culture leading to a shortfall in local cuisine?”
In addition, we seem to have never grown out of our post-war obsession with abundance.
“Unfortunately, most restaurants want to produce for the masses because that is where they think the money is,” Mona continues. “The masses want mounds: they want to feel like they’re going to explode at the end of a meal. And that’s the easiest thing to do: buy cheap, sell cheap.”
Part of the reason involves a natural tendency to take the easy way out, with restaurateurs opting for ingredients on the strength of their price and convenience, rather than on their quality. This in turn also helps to explain the proliferation of certain styles of cuisine above others; and Mona claims it also accounts for the above-mentioned demise of traditional Maltese food.
“Unlike ‘Chinese’ food, Maltese food is not available from a freezer bag. It needs research, love and technique. It needs good quality local ingredients. Chefs do not just frown upon Maltese food: they run a mile, denigrating it while not knowing how to produce it. People like Kevin Bonello, one of the few who have brought Maltese cuisine into the 21st century, are a rarity. In people’s minds, Maltese food is ‘old’. This is what is killing it. Food is primordial, but we need it every day. Essentially then, it is modern...”
And if the decor has improved, some of the more crucial aspects of a successful restaurant have been slow to catch up.
“Service is still a joke. I go to London regularly and in 98% of cases, the staff are informed, enthusiastic and polite. Here they are underpaid, undertrained, under-recruited.... Doing a waiting job in Malta is still considered, in most cases, a form of slavery for whoever is doing it...”
Rules and regulations But while problems can easily be diagnosed, curing them is another matter altogether. It is debatable whether shortcomings in the restaurant industry can be addressed through regulation. Nor is it clear who, if anyone, should be entrusted with the task of supervision and monitoring in the first place.
“The issue almost certainly should be left to the law of supply and demand,” is the Guide’s view. “Our experience is that poor restaurants tend not to survive for very long. Good restaurants, on the other hand, tend to flourish. It is very difficult to regulate and monitor aspects of restaurants such as décor, ambience, service, consistency, excellence of cooking, etc., but obviously there should be strict control with regard to hygiene standards.”
Others, including Mona, take a slightly different view. “I think there is too much quality control actually, and it’s all hygiene – rather than flavour- or source, based. There are no inspectors for quality product (except, if you could call me that, me).”
Still, Mona does not advocate a fullscale inquisition on the restaurant industry. “Rather than regulating, we should be encouraging: the suppliers, the producers and the restaurateurs themselves.”
While agreeing that ‘regulation’ should be left in the hands of the consumer, Mona nonetheless believes that certain underlying issues should be addressed at government level: namely the neglect shown towards local produce, which has been devalued in the mad scramble for cheaper, substandard imported ingredients.
“We have to go to the grassroots, literally,” she argues. “The responsibility lies with the Ministry for Agriculture, which has been ridiculously quiet on the whole issue. Pig farmers are dying out, bakers are dying out, agricultural production and ecologically-sound techniques a rarity. We could have turned the whole island into an organic paradise, small as we are, yet we have farmers who do not even know how to feed their animals unless they give them pellets; who cannot water their crops unless the water is drenched with pesticide... And when they try to go back to our grand-parents’ methods they are slapped, hard. Can somebody please set a huge alarm clock outside of the minister’s office and wake him up?”
Value for money If inconsistency, quality and poor service were not enough, the restaurant sector has also been under fire for being overpriced - not least by the Finance Ministry, which recently claimed that an increase in hotel and restaurant prices directly pushed up of inflation by 18.64%.
The Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association naturally reasons differently, placing the blame for restaurant prices squarely on taxes and government-induced expenses.
“MHRA is currently in discussion with government over the VAT rate on restaurants, which at 18% is too high compared with other markets,” restaurants spokesman Alex Bonello said in response. “In other European destinations, VAT on restaurants has been reduced to 5%. Ours is therefore the highest in Europe... so by reducing the rate, we would be restoring a level playing field.”
Bonello also echoes restaurateurs’ complaints that unlike its European counterparts, the government of Malta has precipitated matters by pushing up prices of essential commodities.
“Added to the VAT issue are other government-induced costs, which even in times of recession tend to be 100% increases,” he said, with reference to recent price hikes in utilities and fuel.
Restaurateurs also deny having raised their prices at all in recent months – still less by the rates suggested by the Finance Ministry.
“Research undertaken by MHRA indicates that restaurant prices have actually remained stable for the past six months,” Bonello said. “I can’t understand where they are getting their figures from, when they say that prices have gone up...”
But whether or not menu prices have pushed up inflation, and whether or not the issue can even be resolved through a reduction in VAT, critics still argue that clients do not get value for their money in Maltese restaurants.
“We pay too much for too little quality,” Mona maintains. “We pay for industrial farming and food miles. We pay for marketing, because advertising costs money. For value for money, try Sicily or South Africa: excellent raw ingredients, lovingly produced and proudly presented...”
In a sense, it is also the nature of the business itself – especially in a market which depends so much on the annual influx of summertime tourists – that automatically pushes prices up.
“The problem with the restaurant business in a highly seasonal line of work is that substantial costs have to be recuperated in a relatively short space of time, and this inevitably has an impact on prices,” the Definitive(ly) Good Guide points out. “This is one of the reasons that we have always maintained one of the functions of the guide is to encourage locals to patronize the good restaurants throughout the year, and particularly in the low season. This obviously enables restaurants to offer better prices throughout the year including the tourist season.”
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