| The Truth about Good Restaurants |
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| For those of us who love their spread of the written
word sprinkled with controversy and a drizzling of food, the past five
years have been like the seven years of great plenty (I was never good
at maths). Publishers have been churning out better book after a good
one, sandwiching a couple of duds like Dr. Gillian McKeith’s horrible
You Are What You Eat, between wonderful tomes. My shelves bear the brunt of well-thumbed copies of Greg Critser’s Fat Land, Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label, Stanley Feldman and Vincent Marks’ Panic Nation, Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne’s Food is Better Medicine than Drugs and obviously Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation which seem to have kicked it all off. I have spent this last week engrossed in the latest addition: Jill Fullerton-Smith’s The Truth About Food (about LM11 from Agenda) a print spin-off of a BBC television series in which the presenter sets about busting or proving some myths which are constantly circling around the world of consumption like hungry vultures. These days, every serious analyst, at least the ones who are not being ‘backed’ by the multi-national drug companies, is saying that a lot of the medicine we take is completely useless or, worse still, causes irreparable harm through side-effects in the short and long term. Blood pressure and cholesterol can be reduced by simply changing lifestyle and switching to a no-packaged-food diet. Water retention can be over and done with if we cut out wheat and drink more tea and water, which are excellent diuretics. The closest we go to an evolutionary diet – meat, protein, ‘old’ fruits such as berries, and root vegetables – the better we feel. The story is almost never ending: antibiotics kill all bacteria and not just the bad ones, but we’re giving them to almost newborn children too, scared senseless of what we’re told will happen if we don’t, but not informed enough to know that we’re damaging our children’s stomach lining in our zeal to ‘cure a cold’ and making their immune systems weaker in the process. I find myself having to argue with nurses in order not to imbue antibiotics willy nilly. This shouldn’t have to be. Most food has a specifically good and bad effect on us, and we can use it to fix ourselves. But of course, where’s the profit in that for the big guns? Think about it a little: if somebody invented a drug that could cure a disease, then they may as well kiss their shareholders goodbye. The sad thing is that we are now scared not to take prescribed drugs because we’re worried we’re going to kill ourselves. In the process, we are killing ourselves anyway. Of course the discipline required to change a lifestyle and diet is stronger than that of popping a colourful bag of pills during different times of day. In order to do this we need to know how to buy food preferably by patronising the sellers who make an effort – our village greengrocers who bother growing their own, the butchers who really know what makes good, fresh meat and the producers who bother to tell us how packed items can stay so long on the shelf. Then we need to know how to cook it so that we actually enjoy the process and the eating itself. And of course, we need good restaurants to give us a wonderful social element. This week, I can finally bring you one of them: Tarragon in St. Paul’s Bay. Run by the affable Marvin, who was at Wild Thyme for many years, Tarragon has shot, in the space of literally a couple of months, straight to the top of our gastro radar. The posse descended upon it already looking forward to a feast. The Architect’s sister had just closed a week’s holiday on the island with so many visits to the place, she knew the menu by heart. She went once and she couldn’t tear herself away. Coming from a family that knows its good food, that was already a high recommendation. I dropped the ‘low-carb’ bomb on the poor chef, hardly fair considering that I didn’t give him any warning, on a night when he didn’t have a single empty table. This didn’t faze him at all. His list is going down a treat with punters, but if you’re a bit fussy (like me) don’t let Marvin’s menu unimpress you. When I saw it online (www.tarragonmalta.com) I thought that it was lazy, probably because most other ‘forward-looking’ chefs are churning out more words than food, preferably in four different languages. Here, verbosity is available and tiring but at least, describes the real thing. The food, on the other hand, is specific, tight as a fist and goes for the jugular. We had plates of shellfish, as fragrant and ozonic as the sea will allow. The ‘Tortellacci neri: barracuda, salmon and ricotta wrapped around black squid ink pasta with a chunky tomato, roasted bell pepper and shellfish jus folded with crème fraiche’ which everybody is literally talking about (although using less words to do so) were to die for. I had one; the others had as many as they could stuff down their gullet. For the first time since Victor Borg’s attempts at similar construction, the fish mix inside the pasta was juicy and moreish, with the rage of boiling water working with, rather than against, the pasta filling. While everybody was ooo-ing and aah-ing as if we hadn’t been out in ages and somebody had released us from a sofa, we were also noticing the ambiance and service. The red walls and sea-faring décor manages to be warm without verging on the shlock and kitsch. The service is friendly, courteous and well-informed, bothering to check if there is a lack of information anywhere. And Marvin, amazingly, manages to keep up with the kitchen and front of house without missing a beat, flitting in and out of the production and presentation spaces. He is also young and, according to my gay friends, very good looking. They were attempting to literally stab each other with a fish knife under the table while fighting ‘over’ him. They did not have to fight over the mains though, because the portions were copious and wouldn’t stop coming. We indulged in as much fish as we could, all perfectly grilled or steamed. I adored the stewed, herby octopus. They attacked the roast potatoes and I went for the clean and clear green salad of rocket with flakes of parmesan. TA loves his Indonesian style chicken tossed in peanut, sweet chilli, garlic and coconut cream and there was no tearing him away from it. For the first time in Malta, it actually tasted as it was described, and the ingredients turned out to fuse into more than the sum of their parts, heavy on the peanut and too gooey for The Writer on the coconut milk but well injected with chilli. I always say that the only way I’ll break my low-carb regime, especially since I’m finally getting back into my now-loose clothing, is if it is really, but really, worthwhile. Marvin’s crème brulee was: the burnt top equivalent of Palazzo Santa Rosa’s quivering-breast pannacotta. I hate seeing stuff like Baci cakes on a serious menu, but here, desserts are about homeliness and cosiness rather than 5 bits and bobs of stuff in lines and shot glasses. Everybody loved their desserts so much they started to order second helpings of somebody else’s. And this, from size 0-loving fashionistas. Tarragon has a small, but cute outside area to which we retreated after this scrumptious dinner for fags and chats. We also watched other diners coming out of the restaurant sporting huge smiles. Finally, a seriously good-food restaurant with no pretensions and a love for the real. That, to me, will always be the ultimate truth. |
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