Mezzodì
80, South Street
Valletta
Tel: 2124 2938

Food: 8/10
Service: 9/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 7.5/10

This is the time of year when the heat starts to get to us. I spend the winter enjoying the cool and staring in disbelief when humans around me proclaim their eagerness for summer to come around. The only thing that makes the heat bearable is the unashamed schadenfreude I feel when these bipeds start to complain about the heat. Well, I proclaim loudly, you wished for it and now you have it.

Part of my way of coping is planning escapes to cooler climates. I was discussing a couple of trips I have planned while seated at a table of like-minded gourmands and our discussions inevitably turn to the food. We quickly realised that we were speaking about practically every destination as serving food that’s reasonably priced. Which quickly led to us pointing out that we are routinely overcharged for what we eat.

I wouldn’t mind paying, for instance, Copenhagen prices for food if we lived in a country that’s as beautiful and simultaneously as functional. We do pay the same prices but we don’t get a fraction of the infrastructure and, in most cases, neither do we receive the same quality of food.

The issue is that food is one of society’s great equalisers. For a long time, the price of a Big Mac was considered one of the most reliable indicators of the health and wealth of an economy. If we’re paying a fiver for a sandwich, there’s a significant swathe of the population that must necessarily be struggling to access decent food. And that’s a cause for concern.

In time we changed gears from the rather sobering tone of our conversation and turned to places we’d eaten and quite enjoyed. One of the guys at table mentioned Mezzodì in Valletta and, as I do when I hear about a new eatery, I squirrelled the information away into that part of my brain that only works when I’m planning a meal and waited for it to surface.

It wasn’t long before I was planning an evening in Valletta and I walked in without a reservation, hoping for the best. It is in a beautiful location, with the entrance across the road from the Opera House. It is inside the building that hosts the marvellous Domus Zammitello and from inside the restaurant you can peek into the fairy tale that its foyer has walked straight out of.

The interior boasts a neoclassical décor with relative restraint. Louis XVI chairs that contribute a functional beauty to any space they inhabit and there’s that pale green wall colour that puts you half in the mind of a French chateau and half on edge because your school’s detention room probably had it on the walls. There is a whole collection of blue-pattern porcelain plates affixed to the wall with those springy devices that other people know how to operate but that I’d surely never get the hang of.

It’s lovely to have restaurants like Mezzodì to go to when you’re in the mood for treating yourselves

With the exception of two, seemingly random, tables there are no tablecloths so we’re sitting at what could be a brasserie and eating off plain, wooden tables. Lovely cutlery and crockery partly make up for the lack of linen. There’s also a bistro-style menu board with the daily specialities. We don’t need to commit every eatery to an established style so we’ll place Mezzodì halfway between a bistro and a brasserie. The music playing in the background is inoffensive but a bit too loud.

The specialities board complements the menu. While the menu itself is traditional to the point where it could verge on the boring, the board brings some fun to the table. It’s like the chef had a few constraints with the menu itself and is using the board to have some fun with seasonal ingredients.

Service continues along the theme that the décor establishes. Two men saw to us that evening and they both know the art of service. One man was evidently running the front-of-house and he knows the food and the wine really well. He’s polite and friendly without unnecessary formality. He’s ably aided by another young man who was attentive and cheerful, making sure we were kept in constant supply of water and wine without ever being intrusive. The fine line between formal service that puts you on edge and an informality you’re fine with when spending a tenner on your lunch is often misunderstood. This is clearly not the case at Mezzodì and I’d be hard pressed to fault the way we were treated.

The menu starts off with an antipasti/cicchetti section and recommends three to be shared between two guests. The Venetian notion of cicchetti is gaining popularity across the fancier dining circuits so I expect to see the word used more often. For a while, informal menus borrowed the word ‘tapas’ to describe little antipasti you’re expected to share but it was quickly maligned by the seemingly endless stream of disappointing execution. So far, the cicchetti approach has maintained its romantic charm and let’s hope it doesn’t slide into the same ignominy.

We picked two items from the menu and a third from the day’s specialities. We ordered both main courses from the board and added a bottle of Loire valley Sauvignon from a wine list that starts quite modestly, climbs to the price range I’d ordered from, and then goes up to those beautiful liquids that deeper pockets can reach for.

Before our antipasti, our man brought a basket of freshly-baked panini and chilli crackers, a little pot of hummus, and some beautiful olive oil.

The better half had picked a buffalo burrata with San Daniele, served with tomato and basil for a posh take on the caprese which effectively means there’s little more to describe it than the sum total of fresh ingredients.

I went with a more indulgent stracciatella with Avruga caviar. If I’m starting with a simple dish in this environment I’m doing it properly. Stracciatella as a fat base has the creaminess of soft butter without the salt and the caviar adds a very delicate salting and that pop of flavour as the roes burst in your mouth. A splash of olive oil adds an acidic structure to the dish, completing it.

My second antipasto was a proper treat. Scallops, nduja and spinach leaves were served wrapped in baking paper and piping hot. This dish shows off the technical skill that’s busy in the kitchen - perfectly cooked scallop, the spiced nduja balanced like a tightrope and spinach leaf for the texture and slightly tart acidity of the baby leaf. In a dish where so much can go wrong, this was the point in the meal where I looked in the direction where I believed the kitchen to be and doffed an imaginary hat in respect.

Our main courses took a little while longer than the starters had but the wait is perfectly reasonable. I’d ordered the fillet with guanciale and a red wine reduction and the better half had picked cod with a cauliflower purée and an almond dressing.

I tasted hers first, knowing mine was a significantly more complex dish. The cod had been cooked perfectly and the layered plating was an impressive structure to behold. I found the dressing to be a little too sweet for my liking but I wasn’t the one eating it and she didn’t seem to mind.

My fillet was quite a large cut, about 5cm high at the centre, and cooked rare. The guanciale was served simply as paper-thin slices that were heating up gently with the heat of the steak, lending a smoked and unctuous flavour to the meat. My issue was, once again, with the ripe sweetness of the sauce. It was so sweet that I found myself doing all I could to avoid it coming into contact with the meat. As sides I’d ordered buttered carrots and puréed potatoes, both of which were pretty decent.

At €150 for the meal and wine, we’re paying for the experience we had walked in for – a marvellous location, good food, great service, and a relative lack of restraint when ordering food and wine. I’m sure we could have been more reasonable with our choices and wound up paying less than that. But then what’s the point of being reasonable if your aim for the night is to give in to the desire for indulgence? When that happens, conversations like we’d had about the great leveller that food prices are go straight out of the window. And it’s lovely to have restaurants like Mezzodì to go to when you’re in the mood for treating yourselves.