Piccolo Padre — Restaurant in Saint Julian's

In October we went to this restaurant for my 24th birthday, everything was excellent very good service and good food. This time, the contrast couldn’t be bigger.

Yesterday we went back to this restaurant for my dads 70th birthday. My parents went the day before to reserve a table for 7 and they mentioned it was his 70th birthday celebration while making the reservation. We reserved a table for 18:30 - 19:00 and actually arrived a bit earlier around 18:20.

We ordered our aperitivo, starters, mains and bottles of wine and water. When my starter came they had given me the quinoa salad with figs and goat cheese instead of the roasted figs with goat cheese and parma ham. Mistakes happen that’s okay but when I received the correct dish, they didn’t even bother to roast the figs that they took from the previous plate. It was still allright, for the rest we were pretty satisfied with the starters.

The starters were hardly cleaned of the table and our mains arrived less than 5 minutes later. We were joking that they were rushing us out because they want to reset the table.

My parents took the rabbit in October, it was one of the best rabbit dishes they’ve had in their 8 trips to Malta, yesterday, 3 of us took the rabbit and it was undercooked. So tough to get off the bone it was still completely attached to the bone, while usually it should almost fall of the bone when cooked properly. My brother took the carbonara and it didn’t taste like your classic Italian carbonara with guanciale, here they used parmesan instead of pecorino and the egg was a bit curdled. It had a weird aftertaste. The swordfish and salmon were good.

We ordered after dinner digestifs and coffees, the digestifs we requested all double instead of single. While we were waiting, the big bald guy with glasses put a note down on our table and said ‘No worries, it’s in an hour’, what we were thinking was actually the case. They were in fact rushing us out despite us ordering a lot of dishes + drinks. We were absolutely stunned.

We’re celebrating a birthday, made our reservation the day before stating we were celebrating a birthday and we’re being rushed out. All our digestifs we got were singles instead of doubles - probably so we wouldn’t be occuping the table for too long. Thankfully the bill said 1 shot for all the digestifs we ordered. My dad was really upset that his birthday celebration was ruined like this. What was supposed to be a nice enjoyable evening left a sour taste.

We asked for the bill and funnily enough, that took a while. Our server - I believe he is Serbian - was nice, however because of this rude behaviour of his colleague with the bald head and glasses, we ended up not leaving any tip because it ruined the vibe of the night completely and the food was mediocre and we were disappointed.

Note: My parents are restaurant owners themselves for 23 years and they would never ever treat their customers like that let alone if someone is celebrating their birthday and they are spending money, if we would just be sitting there and not ordering drinks I would’ve partially understood but this was absolutely foul. The only case where my parents would rush someone out who’s spending money is when the restaurant is about to close. Also, it’s fine if you want to reset a table, but there’s no need to bring a note to our table and say we’ve got one more hour left. Keep the next reservations out of sight of your current customers, keep the notes behind the bar. It’s absolutely rude the way we were rushed out no pauses between the dishes and then getting that note...

Summary in case you are short on time:

One of the most iconic Maltese restaurants has been given a long overdue refurbishment, but alas, it mutated into a tourist trap somewhere along the way. A well deserved donkey hat goes to management.

Truth is I hadn't been at this joint ever since they refurbished, so I decided to join my wife for a birthday dinner of one of her friends. Can't say I missed much...

The first alarm bell was the decidedly seedy-looking tout coaxing passers-by to enter. A good place to eat doesn't need that does it? The same tout greeted us with a lovely "Table for two?". Charming. When we replied we had a reserved table, he asked the same question again with a frustrated tone, because you know, customers who actually call in at the restaurant you're soliciting for are a waste of your time.

Inside the place has been given a lovely makeover, which along with the view of the bay makes it a potential gem (it was, in a galaxy far far away, a long time ago), but unfortunately it stalls at a mile and a half from that, or perhaps even two.

The menu is well varied, although the selection of local Maltese wines is disappointing, to put it mildly. There were also some dubious items such as 'local' catfish. Since when in parched Malta, do we have freshwater fish, unless it's grandma's goldfish, I ask?

Blaring, repetitive music is also somewhat annoying, we could barely hear each other talk. Going to the bathroom, the music volume only got louder, so much so that it seems that the paper towels ran away, never to be seen again.

The service was admittedly good, and the food was good but not great. The waitress however did not bother to inform us that the mains came with sides such as roast potatoes and roast veg - a minimum gesture of decency would have been to inform us that the sides of roast potatoes and veg were already provided. Cut a long story short, we had our table overflowing with sides, so much so we took most of it back home. The truffle and parmesan roast potatoes were somewhat disappointing, with three quarters of it not tasting of truffles at all.

Needless to say, with all that food we did not have enough room for the dessert, so I suppose letting us overorder wasn't that smart, given that most desserts cost more than the sides.

Cherry on the cake was the bill, where for some unexplicable reason, a bajtra spritz was charged 8 euro at the first round, and an impressive 16 for the second round. A cutting edge technique for moderating alcohol abuse perhaps? Who knows, but all 10 of us don't seem really keen of testing our theory with another visit.

P.s. we usually leave about 2-3 euro tips each, that's about 20-30 Euro. We left almost none. Enough said. Honesty is the best policy in this business, but unfortunately, we didn't see...

Worst dining experience in a long time.

Where do I start... When we arrived, no one attended us or greeted us for a good 5 minutes. There was a loud beeping noise at one of the tills that none of the staff seemed to care about. When we were eventually seated it was without a smile or welcome. We had specifically emailed and asked for a specific seat on the balcony, which we were promised but did not get. That would have been alright if not for the rude response by the manager who didn’t seem to care, and simply stated that it was out of his control. The starters were okay. We had calamari which was fresh, and a ham and cheese ‘panini’ - although this wasn’t how it was described on the menu... Whilst we were waiting, we noticed that the same 3 songs were on repeat, over and OVER. This was supposedly a traditional Italian restaurant, however they decided to play Bruno Mars, The Weekend and Rihanna.

For the mains my partner and I had the rabbit tagliatelle, however I don’t say this lightly when I say this was the plainest pasta I’ve had in my life. It wasn’t fresh, and was clearly straight out of the packet. It was extremely oily, without any other sauce or seasoning, and the rabbit hadn’t been properly de-boned! We asked for salt and pepper, and the waiter begrudgingly slammed a plastic box of salt and pepper sachets in front of us, instead of the actual grinders that were beside them. We didn’t finish our mains, and explained how it was plain and not what we were expecting.

We saw that other diners around us also didn’t finish their food. A different gentleman serving us was very polite and apologetic, however when we asked for the bill we were abhorred to see that we were charged for the mains. We did not say anything further, we paid, and then promptly left. We did not want to stay a second longer! The manager caught us at the door and asked how our food was. He clearly wasn’t told about our feedback. We explained, and, without apology, he asked if I’d ever had rabbit before (as if that would matter), and then said we should have just got another dish instead. This was, as you can imagine, extremely unhelpful as we had already paid and were walking out the door.

This was supposed to be one of the nicest restaurants in Malta, and to our surprise, ended up being one of the worst experiences ever. All in all, we would not...