Sliema doesn’t pride itself to have pioneered in Malta’s hospitality industry but, when it joined, it caught on with a vengeance – the Imperial Hotel, Savoy, Regina, Meadowbank, Eden Rock, Astra and the very first Maltese ambition to skyscraper status – the Preluna. Some early drinking spots, like Tony’s, the 1922 Hole in the Wall, Nappa and Reno still flourish.

A David Moore postcard for Newman’s Place on the Strand

The Golden Seven Scottish pub and restaurant distributed these promotion postcards.

A Sinetmalta postcard for the Eden Rock hotel and restaurant

Sliema, before being massively colonised by the Maltese bourgeoisie, had attracted British servicemen and their families. They needed comfy corners where to quench their thirst and order stake and chips.

A David Moore card for the Kennedy Grove hotel and restaurant

These old eateries have their own peculiar history to recount – how Tony’s came to be decorated by Robert Caruana Dingli; how the Israeli Mossad chose a Sliema hotel for a high-profile assassination; how the owners of Bonello’s Kiosk became victims of a shameful political highjack.

Promotion for the Magic Kiosk, formerly Bonello’s Kiosk

Today’s British-style bars and pubs derive directly from the antique dverna, except that these served only wine and aquavit, while the colonisers popularised beer, whisky, gin and rum.

The Surfside Bar offered a choice of over 400 drinks.

In my days, the locals still called booze bumbu, which is not baby talk as our lexicographers assert, but British seamen’s lingo for rum with spices in the Caribbean.

Colonial drinking culture left other bizarre traces in our language. English has teetotaller for someone who doesn’t touch alcohol. In Maltese, it means exactly the opposite: ħanut tat-titotla is a shop licensed to sell spirits. And barmejd, deputised awkwardly for women of commercial virtue.

1980s advertising postcard for the Day’s Inn

An Artex postcard for the Golden Chef restaurant

The Black Gold Saloon’s advertising cards

Publicity postcard for Il Galeone restaurant

With the post-Independence explosion of mass tourism, diners mushroomed all over Sliema. Several stake or fish-and-chips places at first – cooks made redundant by the Services’ rundown tempted their luck. But also the earliest nouvelle cuisine restaurant, The Carriage, or exotic diversions – the first Turkish, Mangal and the first Indian, Krishna.

A Taj Mahal Indian restaurant card, postally used in 1982.

All cards from the author’s collections.