Fish by Fumia
Tigné Point
Sliema
Tel: 2133 7694

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

Even by my standards, this is hardly a restaurant review. Those of you who hate my intro and read the bit about the food can skip all the way to the very end.

I’ve been to Fumia several times in all its guises and it has consistently served good food, even if service has sometimes dipped a little. I’ve been to Fumia back when it was at the very top of a car park in Sliema, then when they buried the place underneath the Manoel Theatre, followed them when they moved to the beautiful ‘vecchia dogana’ building in Sa Maison, and now, more recently to their fourth restaurant simply called ‘Fish’. To be fair, they’ve qualified it with ‘by Fumia’ as a guarantee of quality.

I’ve lost many of you to the first traffic diversion. But I’m not content building one flyover so here’s another. If you struggle to keep two, opposing, notions in your mind at the same time, take the next bypass. It will lead you to the very end where I speak about food.

The story does start at Fumia. I received a call at about 11am – I remember the time because it interrupted my third breakfast. The call was intended to ask if I’d made lunch plans. I hadn’t. Well then, I should be at Fumia at 1pm  sharp. And no, it’s not the Fumia you’re thinking of, I was told, it was the one at The Point, adjacent to Chophouse.

I was on time, which meant I had about 15 minutes alone with the view and the menus. And this is where the struggle began. Part of me recoils at a menu that prices its octopus salad at €18, anchovies in vinegar at €15 and a plate of spaghetti with clams at €18. Of course, this is one of the prettiest places on the island – you can’t see the horror that is Sliema because it is all behind you. Instead, you can see the Valletta skyline, cranes and all.

I’d imagine the rent to be priced according to the rarity of the location just like I’d imagine the food cost to be on the upper levels because you are getting Fumia quality. Still, we tend to attach our perceived value to anything we’re about to purchase.

This is where the dilemma enters. I don’t think anything we choose to buy can be expensive. If I were to take the beat-up Casio off my wrist and offer it for sale at the price of a Swiss chronograph, you could consider the price to be expensive by a factor of at least a thousand. Yet, if someone decided the price were fair and paid what I asked, a market has been created. This is probably within the first pages of an economics textbook. I wouldn’t remember because the last I opened such a textbook was several thousand litres of wine ago.

Here lies the dilemma. We’d chosen to go to a restaurant where we knew that the average price of a plate of pasta hovered around the €20 mark. The temptation to get all upset about this by saying, “We’d pay a fraction of the price for the same quality if we were eating out in Sicily” is clear and present.

To which the reply would be, “Have you seen the state of the economy in Sicily?” Sicily is so broke that Sicilians are escaping to Malta. For our islands to be an attractive economic proposition, the place you’re escaping must be dire.

So, while it is tempting to consider the price of the menu of a restaurant like Fish by Fumia to be expensive, we must consider that anyone visiting is doing so of their own volition. We went there prepared to pay more for a dish than the average because the sum of the experience – the location, the service, the quality of the food, and the beauty of the interiors – to be above what we consider that average to be.

I went there in the company of a group of men who are used to paying for food and who know exactly what to expect. To make matters even more interesting, everyone at table except myself was an excellent cook in their own right.

This man is a shining example of what service ought to be – never obsequious, always polite, thoroughly understanding, and friendly without being invasive

We were greeted and taken care of by one of the men who runs the show. He knows service in a way that is practically instinctive. He reads the table, he understands who he is talking to and he converses accordingly. This takes skill. Real service treats the table as a group of equals, united with the man in a shared love for great food and beautiful wines. This man is a shining example of what service ought to be – never obsequious, always polite, thoroughly understanding, and friendly without being invasive.

Then there’s the layer added by his knowledge of the food they serve and his relationship with the kitchen. We had the menus in hand but we were mostly improvising, basing our choices on ingredients we’d seen scattered around the menu, and our man was keen on making our wishes come true.

I’d been there for dinner and had eaten fish and I don’t need to spend much time writing about their mastery of picking the right fish at point of purchase and preparing it masterfully. This time round, we were there for a single dish and we were all in the mood for pasta. One of the specialities of the day was pasta with triglia, the lovely little red fish that oozes flavour from its skin and its oily flesh. As tempting as this sounded, we also liked the idea of pasta with clams or mussels. At the suggestion of one of the better cooks at table, we asked if we could have a mix of all three and this was met with enthusiasm and encouragement.

The result, we were assured, would be just lovely. We were about to leave it at that but two of us, with myself as chief proponent, wanted to start with something small to get our appetites working. The rest quickly acquiesced.

The man who was helping us out suggested a couple of dishes. They had fresh shrimp that they could serve simply marinated and could do the same with tuna. This would provide the introduction we needed without filling our bellies before the pasta landed. We added a bottle of Sicilian white and settled in.

Our antipasti were served quite quickly. The marinated shrimp wasn’t quite what I’d expected – I was after proper raw shrimp where a simple dressing allows the flavour of the crustacean to remain but these had all but cooked in their marinade. That’s not to say they weren’t perfectly enjoyable.

I took exception to the tuna though. The marinade was acidic to a point where it had cooked the flesh of this lovely slice of tuna belly and had taken over completely, with the fish contributing little but texture so the flavour was that of vinegar and citrus. I consider this to be a waste of perfectly good tuna and voiced this opinion. While there were a couple of the guys who agreed, I was the only one to leave most of my portion behind – the rest devoured their vinegar bombs.

The pasta was an entirely different story. It was a symphony of delicate flavours that had been balanced with discipline and mastery. Achieving such depth and beauty of flavour with a few, simple ingredients is what separates Fumia from so many restaurants that serve fish dishes. The pasta is cooked to perfection, the sauce simple and free from ingredients that could stomp all over the fragrance of triglia and clams, excellent olive oil and wine used to carry it all, and a portion size that’s adapted to a lunchtime meal.

We ate in almost perfect silence, bar the occasional grunt of appreciative satisfaction. When we were done, we agreed we’d eaten just as much as we should have for lunch and, swept by this feeling of communal virtue, ordered cannoli, pannacotta and almond cake to finish off in style.

I only tried the cannoli and, well, there’s little to say about them other than that they would make it into the menu for my elective last supper.

We paid €50 each for the meal and I won’t go into the merits of this because I’ve discussed it at sufficient length. Suffice it to say that I fully intend lunches at Fumia to be a regular occurrence for me, even if it means I’ll have to sell my ancient Casio at some point.