As we ease into the new planetmona and both myself and the readers get used to it, I now have better access to what articles the Funs love to read. As expected, ten years after I started reviewing restaurants, five and a half years after planetmona.com’s birth and two revamps later, the restaurant reviews are still the most read articles on the site.

This makes sense. After all, planetmona was simply a reaction to an ex-deputy editor who, short-sightedly, and with the usual amount of 'journalistic' spite (the Mona’s Meals reviews took away a lot of his on-the-side restaurant PR stunts) would not put the restaurant reviews on the newspaper website. Life has taught me that when given kilos of lemons one needs to learn to make limoncello, granita and mousse.

When it comes to local restaurants, though, it feels as if they not only do not know what to do with the rind, the juice or the pulp: they are looking at the lemons and thinking 'waa dis?' and throwing them away. So I now write in a very weird environment: more people read me, people are constantly clamouring for reviews, yet the very subject I write about has taken a headlong dive into a pool with no water.

These days, when I find a good restaurant that I can recommend, I am nothing if not surprised. I started reviewing back in 2000 and since then, with a few bumps, hills and valleys along the way, the situation in local restaurants has done nothing but deteriorate, with a little peak around 2004/5. Since a restaurant critic’s job is to review restaurants, if no new restaurants open, if the good ones become less than good, if the good chefs emigrate, if the new chefs have no money (or guts) to open their own place, then the job will be severely impacted.

Nobody, including restaurant critics, has any interest in reviewing bad restaurants on a constant basis. Some local 'reviewers', you may have noticed, have every interest to gush about everywhere: taking flak (and not taking advertising euro) because you're honest is no joy. Although, judging by the hits on planetmona, one-star restaurant reviews get higher page views than the 5 star ones do, and the Funs do love a tragedy, nobody wants to eat it. Nobody wants to spend their money on rubbish. That includes me.

Moreover, the increase in web (and even hard copy) restaurant ‘critics’ has increased exponentially. Everybody is an expert, a writer, a critic and the restaurants are so good that nobody can be bothered starring them. Oddly, soon after a brilliant review, the restaurant starts to advertise on the very same newspaper or blog they would have been reviewed on. Hmmm. Otherwise, whole pages are dedicated to how fabulous the restaurant is and the magazine does not bother to tell us that the restaurant owners actually paid the magazine to write this. Convenient, non?

Or, as Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser. How can we have more critics, a plethora of Facebook pages and groups, a never-ending amount of blogs, all dedicated to the subject, when the punters are sick and tired of being fleeced, have stopped eating out completely or eat out only because it is a necessity? After all, the social element of eating out cannot be underestimated: it is why deals are signed over an hour's lunch rather than 24 hours of meetings.

Over the past year or so, the complaints about local restaurants have increased, but now people do not just complain. These days, it is not about one-off incidents, badly-trained staff or one meal which went awry: in 2010 in Malta, customers are actually giving up on eating out. And that is serious.

Yet the very same people who are so unhappy with the local situation still get excited about eating in Sicily, France, India and everywhere else they can escape to. So they are not tired of eating out. They have had it with eating out in Malta.

For years I have been writing that the essential issues with restaurants, as with any other business, come down to management, training of staff and purchasing. Restaurants are not extensions of somebody’s personal kitchen and just because you know how to give a lovely supper for eight, it does not mean that you should open your own place and charge people money for it. Restaurants are a business. Sure, you need to love food - that helps - but you also need to be able to manage. Malta has a management problem in general.

When people started cottoning on to the fact that shopping in Malta was a less-than-enjoyable experience, they became experts at offshore shopping. It is not that difficult nowadays and within thirty minutes you can buy yourself an airline ticket , book yourself a boutique hotel, and you’re off. If you cannot leave, you buy online, and many of us are – ASOS, Net-A-Porter, Matches: just try and stop us. Unfortunately you may have noticed that the restaurant experience cannot be consumed via the web.

The essential problem with many local restaurateurs is that they treat people – their own customers, the ones that pay their livelihood - like idiots. In one week, three people sent me personal e-mails, all pleading with me not to publish their names or the name of the restaurant, to tell me that one particular restaurant was serving €10 starters bought from Lidl.

With the first e-mail I thought the person may have got it wrong. How on earth would they know, I wondered. Well, it goes to show: they do. In one particular case, the customer was so irked, so absolutely upset, that she went to Lidl the next day to check if a particular item really had been bought there, and of course, it had. ‘I wish it hadn’t!’ she wrote. ‘I go to this restaurant very regularly. I take clients and business contacts there. I leave huge tips. Did the owner actually think I would not realise what was going on? A 'special' indeed!’. I have the details, which, as I promised her, I am not publishing and you know what, the customer is right in this case.

Although Lidl has, with the same slash-and-burn retail methodology it applies worldwide, damaged some local businesses very badly, although some of its products are extremely low quality (while others are very good value: try the walnuts, which are miles better than those from Good Earth) I have no qualms with shoppers who want to spend their money there. After all, even I succumb regularly, if anything because of their proximity and because, oddly enough, they (intermittently) stock things like ground hazelnuts, which I cannot find elsewhere. Nonetheless, the regular sight of so many restaurant owners doing what is very obviously a commercial food shop (twenty of the same item) is nothing short of shocking.

A few weeks ago I got stuck in one of Lidl’s carparks and had ample time to realise why the driver in the car in front of me could not see from her rear-view mirror: her back seat and her boot, right up to the roof, was packed with Lidl’s pizza and burgers (ready in a bun, complete with lettuce and tomato), soon to be chucked into a microwave in some take-away and sold at three times the price. I understand that confectioners are completely bypassing the agents and buying bulk sweets from Lidl now, too.

All of this is highly undesirable (not to mention flummoxing) but, since I don’t buy pizza, burgers or sweets from these places, it is something I can live with. After all, 'chefs' have been buying commercial sizes of stuff from supermarkets for years now. Who do you think buys those huge vats of 'sweet and sour sauce' from the 'Oriental' sections of Pavi and Smart? Each to his own. Nonetheless, to find cheap items masquerading as something close to ‘quality’ selling for atrocious restaurant prices in what is meant to be a classy restaurant is just beyond the pale.

Purchasing in restaurants has become the domain of unscrupulous chefs who wouldn’t know how to peel a potato’s eyes if it poked them in theirs. For those who do not understand restaurants, or have never worked in one, the money for these kinds of chefs is not just in their salary but in other things. Of course, no restaurateur is going to cheat himself, but if you are employed, working all hours of the day and night, you start to reason in a different way and buying the best ingredients may not be one of those criteria. Who pays for all this? Oh, you do.

Buying fresh, running around all day to small sellers, is a chore. So is ordering, checking what the suppliers have sent, keeping up with what’s in season and what is not. So whoever is in charge of purchasing starts going down easy street, buying what is in season all the time: it is easier buying farmed fish, rather than wild, not only because it’s cheaper, but because it’s constant. Awrat, spnott, tuna: they’re available year-round and they’re cheaper. Who cares if, at this point, they all taste the same? They look good, orderly and polite in the window. The menu doesn't need to be changed all the time. But if you’re charging the same amount as you would for the wild version when you know you’re buying it for half as much then that’s just cheating. And the punters know what you’re doing: you can only fool some people some of the time and those that can be cheated all of the time deserve it.

A couple of years ago, a local (slightly infamous) restaurateur invited me into his kitchen to show off, as they do. Within ten seconds I had noticed the piles of powdered packets of custard and ready-made foods. He was, at the time, charging an average €7 for his desserts, and judging by what I had seen, he had no interest in beating egg yolks to produce them. In a hot kitchen, custard is hell to work with, desserts a chore, pastry chefs almost inexistent (and too expensive to employ full-time) so he had taken the easy way out. When I pointed the packets out to him, he said that they were there ‘just in case’ but I’m no fool: nobody packs half a kitchen with stuff ‘just in case’. Just in case what, exactly? That there is a worldwide egg shortage?

Sadly, it is not just the places we used to consider ‘cheap’ that are opting for trashy raw ingredients which none of us would bother having in our kitchens: the expensive ones are at it too. And these days, there are, possibly, around five good value for money outlets on the island: in a country which has thousands of catering licenses and more than a million tourists yearly, that is nothing short of suicide.

One reader told me last week that he went from a three-time-a-week eater-outer to a once-a-weeker. ‘The rest’ he said ‘I save and spend on eating out of the country’. Considering that an average 3-course dinner for two with wine now costs €80, I’ll do the math for you: that’s €8,320 a year. For that amount, you can go to Asia, travelling business class, and eat fabulous, fresh food non-stop. You can go to Paris and Sicily bi-monthly. You can buy quality meats, fish and vegetables and stay at home. That’s what I do and judging by your feedback, you’re there too.

Food importers, at least those who can be bothered buying quality stuff, complain to me incessantly about the ignorance and sheer arrogance they encounter in restaurant purchasing. Olive oil, for example, is a huge culprit. Restaurants buy quality once then refill the bottles with rubbish, hoping that nobody will realise. They complain to the importers. They take ages to pay, sometimes never.

Most restaurants have no interest in buying quality local hobza (bread) to serve with food. They buy the local hobza which has been made in an electric oven (the traditional way is wood-fired) and comes ready-sliced. Worse off by miles, they produce little, soft burger buns, closer to cake than bread in texture, and expect us to appreciate their efforts. The little Maltese buns, such as those served at Da Pippo are hell to source, the suppliers need to be chased, they normally have no accounting system except for bits of paper. So the restaurateurs cannot be bothered.

Since we’re on the subject of Maltese food, I am so disheartened that there is not a single local restaurant which I can, hand on heart, say is serving true traditional food. Ask a local chef to make you a fried rabbit and see if they know how to. Ask them to produce a lampuki pie and watch how some of them have never even tasted the stuff, let alone made it. We are being served food made, and placed on our tables by, the McDonald's and Chicken Nugget generation. Most readers tell me that ‘the best local food is made and eaten in the home’, which is fine, but if it is not being produced on a commercial level, then it will die as more and more generations are reared on rubbish.

If all this were not enough, the poshest restaurants on the island, the ones we used to patronise with our birthday and anniversary money have, over the past year, taken an almighty dive. They have stopped experimenting, and some of their chefs have not been abroad, to eat themselves, to partake, as customers, in the restaurant experience, in years. Some are obsessed with commercial activities, because running an haute cuisine restaurant out of Paris and London is no joke. There's no money in it. It's all about passion. Some restaurants have had three changes of chefs in 12 months. In one particularly posh one, an ex-manager told me he had to go begging for his own and his staff’s salary every month. Hah: so much for posh.

Many quality restaurant staff have given up and have moved on to work for food and wine suppliers, or, in some cases, emigrated, taking their entire brigade with them. I had a meal at one of my own 5-star rated restaurants a few months ago and was shocked that they were still serving the very boring trio of foie gras as a starter, considered posh by those who have no idea, and dull as dishwater by those who know what inventive food is about. These days I buy foie gras at Zammeats and cook it at home. In a restaurant I want something I cannot make myself: the metier of the chef.  It felt as if I had hit a time warp and I did not review it. Another highly-rated restaurant has service so awful, swinging between good and bad worse than a playground in the wind, that I am embarrassed on their behalf.

Can we, the punters, do anything about this?  At this point, I very much doubt it. It would be just crazy if we continued to patronise these places even though, sadly, for the middle-class mid-lifers, eating out is the one semi-social recourse left. We do not eat out because we need to eat, because we are hungry: we do it so that we have an excuse to wear the clothes we bought at Matches, to get out of the house, to get dressed for our partner, to have a chat away from the children. Eating out is part of the life we live and these people, these Lidl-ingredient cooking, punter-fleecing, restaurant owners are taking it all away from us. They will pay. Sadly, we already are.