Catering tricks

The other day a group of friends were recounting the adventures at a restaurant with the audacious name ‘Xerri il-Bukett’.

They talked about the atrocious service, the good food that was not and of the pasta with shrimps in which the crustaceans that had not been peeled or decapitated.

‘Xerri il-Bukett’, off Qala is certainly not the only restaurant that does little to the world of catering and Gozo is renowned for its wide selection of Neolithic restaurants with the exception of a few.

What does it take to be a caterer in this country? I mean, to open up a restaurant and a cafeteria?

Nothing really, all you need is a hole in the wall and a supernatural belief that you are made for the job and have a benevolent bank manager.

The truth is that Malta has very few middle-of-the road restaurants, they are very good and horrendously expensive or very cheap or very bad.

Some local catering establishments do little to compensate for the heartburn one suffers when reading the bill.

Not all by the way, but many simply do not realise how sloppy and downright exaggerated they are.

The proliferation of restaurants has led to a dispersal of clients and the bad or expensive ones are now starting to grumble about the lack of clients.

Or better still, how bad the economy is.

Most restaurants still believe that anyone dining at noon to eat a four-course meal. Those that do usually end up dozing half way through their office meetings.

What we need are small bistros that offer Mediterranean snacks.

The only other foods found in snack form on this Island, are oily ‘hobza biz-zejt’, a Burger King or a Big Mac.

The alternative is a Maltese cheesecake: a delicious wrapped pastry that offers unending acidity to a delicate stomach.

To have discerning restaurateurs we need to educate the young visionaries in the catering trade. We need to bring up the themes in our school’s curriculum.

We experience 10 to 15 years of intense primary and secondary education, but very little of that education confronts the realities of our adult life: communication skills, home economics, sex, human relations, work ethics, culture, discipline and manners, eating, health and raising children.

Why should we be offended if we are best described as morons or better still uncultured brats, when our education can easily be described as anorexic when it comes to cultural inspiration?

Good Intentions

Just in case you have not noticed, the Taliban, George Grech and the Northern Alliance have not budged an inch.

The Taliban are bombed day and night and are in no mood for giving in to stealth bombs and soldiers in alien outfits. ALLAH is, after all, on their side…

George Grech is thankful that the Maltese public is ultimately highly chauvinistic and could very well believe his story of Oz.

And the Northern Alliance who are a minority in Afghanistan, subsidised by US money, are pictured as Afghani angels.

Conveniently everyone seems to forget that the Northern Alliance also treats its women like lesser beings and hides them behind layers of cloth.

But then who are we to judge their good intentions?

And as in the case of the Taliban, George Grech and the Northern Alliance, it would be very convenient to believe the propaganda that we are fed.