Ed eats
Café Jubilee
209, The Strand
Gżira
Tel: 2133 7141
Food: 8/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 9/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 8/10
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t adopted the rating system I use. While it is useful to evaluate different bits and pieces of the restaurant experience, the final grade does not always match the single mark I’d come up with if I were to assign one as I walked out.
Everything I have sampled has been well planned and well executed despite its deceptive simplicity
This works both ways. There are those occasions where the food was fine, the serving staff did the job,the place was well put together and I paid a reasonable amount of money.
And yet, for a factor that cannot be clubbed into those four characteristics, I’d never ever return. The opposite applies to those who don’t really deserve a 10/10 across the board but that keep me going back for more.
Café Jubilee is an excellent example of the latter. In each of its incarnations, they have created a formula that I think works really well. Here’s why.
There was a time in my life where I visited the same restaurant in France time and time again. I had a number of options that would do for lunch but I returned to this particular place very often.
They had a menu board on the outside that simply promised a plat du jour, or that day’s dish. The French do not bother calling it a speciality. They have the humility to say it as it is – the dish that the chef prepared on the day and would serve to almost anyone.
The price never changed and that is handy for a man on a budget. The meal was always served quickly, simple, balanced and nutritious.
It was also, and this made both economic and gastronomic sense, highly seasonal. Whatever is in season is usually plentiful and therefore cheaper. It is also meant to be consumed at that time of year.
The atmosphere was warm and convivial, the place was timeless in a nondescript sort of way, and the staff did their job without getting too familiar. Friendly without being friends, they greeted me like a customer every time I walked in and wished me a good day on my way out.
The predictability of it all was splendid. And there are tens ofthousands of virtually identicalrestaurants scattered around the country.
Back to our lovely islands, I pop by a Café Jubilee if I am close, mostly for the same reasons.
Last week, being in the Gżira area and with scarcely an hour forlunch, I ended up visiting the Gżira Café Jubilee twice. The food was different but the experience almost identically pleasant.
The restaurant is timeless purely because they’ve chosen a very classical theme to it with the addition of a quaint selection of advertising posters from decades ago. Mismatched frames keep the adverts hanging on the covered walls.
If a slightly crooked frame bothers you, you’re in trouble – whoever has the painstaking job of cleaning them all can’t be bothered straightening them when he’s done.
Little wall-mounted lights give a cosy, warm glow, wooden furniture adds further warmth, and little booths with benches complete the picture. Music by swing bands from the 30s and 40s place you squarely on the chair of a Parisian café back then. The heavy wooden door that swings outwards to let you in could very easily be a cleverly disguised time machine.
The staff is mostly friendly, helpful and polite. The divide, and this will spark controversy, seems to be between the extremely helpful Maltese (and Gozitan in this case) members of staff and those who come from some other country that I can’t seem to identify.
The latter simply do the job but don’t seem to consider being friendly to be a necessary means to that end. They’d probably fit inelsewhere but the contrast at Café Jubilee is more stark.
The menus are interesting in their own right. Their design, an exercise in typographic excellence and discipline at the same time, really matches the style employed by the restaurant and fits right in. They are little flipboard-style affairs that mean you have a number of pages to turn but are very easy to handle.
The food they contain is nothing overly complicated. Suited to a quick lunch or dinner, the items span a range that includes salads, sandwiches, pasta, pies and other similar one-shot meals. Don’t be fooled by the relative simplicity though. Everything I’ve sampled has been well planned and well executed despite its deceptive simplicity.
I always ask about the daily items. While these are on the board somewhere, I’m normally seated before I realise I should have checked them out. One of the days last week offered grilled pork chops with mashed potato. I picked that purely to try something off the menu and wasn’t overly impressed.
Somehow the high standards of the Café Jubilee kitchen had been let down by the grilling process and, while tasty and well-seasoned, the pork had spent too much time in contact with hot metal. I devoured the dish but didn’t walk out as happy as I normally do.
For this meal I was accompanied by a dear friend who knows much more about food than he’ll let on. He ordered the ravioli with dentici and enjoyed them thoroughly. They looked like they were very generously stuffed and the portion size was more than adequate.
The next time I visited, I asked for the daily specials and the dish I ordered was a spaghetti gozitano. I was informed that it would be prepared with peppered cheeselets, Maltese sausage, capers, olives and chilli pepper. Knowing that the place is so strongly linked to Gozo I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
I was there with one of my brothers who couldn’t think of ordering anything other than the ravioli with butter and sage. This seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the menu but our lovely waitress did not falter, taking the order like nothing was amiss.
I secretly suspected she’d come back from the kitchen and tell him not to order anything that’s not on the menu but this didn’t happen.
My pasta was excellent. The ingredients that go into the sauce have evidently been carefully selected for freshness and the result is an intensely flavoured treat that is robust and structured.
The sausage had leaked all its goodness into the sauce, as had the peppered cheeses. Capers, olives and chilli each get their five minutes of fame as well, adding a savoury complexity belied by the simple description.
The ravioli, served with melted butter and fresh sage, are an understated monument to simplicity. The filling is simple and fresh. The sage and butter dance a sombre waltz around the stuffed pasta. The abrupt halt to our conversation isn’t normal when we’re meeting for a quick lunch and that speaks silent volumes about our meal.
We drank a litre of sparkling water and an espresso each to help kick us back to work after our carbohydrate-based lunch. At just over €10 each, this is not the quick daily ftira but then we haven’t paid proper restaurant prices either. The experience, and that is what counts, is unbeatable at this price range.
On our way out we asked ourselves why no one had bothered to imitate this simple and effective formula. It is entirely possible for the country to be dotted with similar providers of daily meals that provide tasty sustenance while allaying boredom.
Until we’re invaded by France again, we’ll stick to Café Jubilee.
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