I have been noticing over the past months that most of my reviews begin with a time-related issue. This is worrying and just means that I’m getting older and not necessarily any wiser. You can tell me I have a few lines around my eyes but you cannot tell me I don’t know a thing or two about food.

This year will be – or is – my tenth year of restaurant reviewing. I once read my first review, three years after I had written it, and cringed so much I ground my teeth into my gums. How could the editor have let me write that, I asked myself, blaming him instead of myself. Honestly, I remember the words a Sunday Times reader had sent me about that article and sometimes still want to creep into a hole to hide.

Mistakes are best committed only once, so I never repeated that one. Although I seemed very cocky way back in 2000, I was as scared as hell as well; cockiness is always just a front for insecurity.

These days I mentor other people, including fledging restaurant critics, who write for me for www.planetmona.com. Most of the time I can see more potential in their talent than they can see themselves. We now have a roaming restaurant critic in Unexpected Traveller, Margerita Pule’ fearlessly writing about culture and art, Dr. Zoran giving us down-to-earth pet and nature advice and a host of other visiting writers, including travel specialists. The new planetmona will even have an Industry Insider writing beautifully, and almost shockingly from the 3 star Michelin restaurant where he works, not to mention the mini Jeremy Clarkson writing honestly (for once on this island) about cars. I am really happy I am lucky enough to have them and judging by your comments, so are you.

The first thing I always tell any new writer is that in writing for the general public, they will be creating their own persona for the readers’ delectation. Sometimes this persona has little to do with their real selves. We are, if you want to look at it like that, schizophrenic on a literary level.

Until this day, people think that all I do is eat out. That I am fat. That I am old. I’m certainly older, but my greatest  joy these days does not come from eating in some high-falutin’ 3-star restaurant in some European city – I do that way too often when I am on my own. Where is the joy in that?

My idea of fabulousness is a very good TV series on DVD (so we can watch it non-stop), a plumped up sofa, pets at my feet, TW on my side, a great dinner he has cooked or a take-out picked up from Garam Masalaa.

To me, restaurant reviewing is a job: a job I pay for, rather than one which pays me. In 80% of cases, eating out in Malta is a huge disappointment. Every now and again, The Writer and I chance upon something great (like Sciacca), return to a standard high-quality favourite (The Arches) or drive to the other end of the island for the best pizza (Margo’s). For all of that, there’s MasterCard; for the moments when we just want our restaurant – simple, scrumptious, just downright good – we have Tal-Familja.

As far as I’m concerned if Marsascala were to vanish off the face of the earth leaving only Tal-Familja, with its lovely Preca family, I would be at perturbed in the least. I spent my teenage summers in this town, back when the front had houses, rather than a mish-mash of horrendous architecture and pile-em-high restaurant.

We go to Tal-Familja for long, lazy Saturday lunches. Nobody there knows us, and we know nobody, except of course, for the Precas. We go for never-ending suppers.I have been with endless colleagues there and we all return a little happier to work for it. The Writer and I have taken countless amounts of foreign friends – Italians, Spaniards, Australians – to Tal-Familja and we have never, ever been let down or worse, embarrassed. Even the Brits enjoy it. We have organised birthday parties, anniversary parties and even book-launch parties, there, and again, the food and service was always stunningly good.

A quick look ‘round and you will soon figure out why we love this place: the decoration is really nothing special, and I’m sure that on the last visit they only brought out the fabric napkins because I was there (although of course, everybody had them, not just us). Nonetheless, they manage to cater to the ‘fillet, well-done, with mushroom sauce’ brigade as well as they stun the foodies.

On this last foray – a quick decision which entailed a post-work message to TW that I didn’t feel like cooking – we had the Precas’ approximation of a degustation, which, good on them, they refuse to call so. A strong part of the experience in this place is listening to Charlie explain what they have on the day:  a never-ending stream of tapas-like titbits made it to our table, accompanied by some superbly chilled red, borne by their staff.

‘Don’t order any fish‘ Charlie said ‘If you are hungry after this, sure thing, but I think you’ll feel quite fine without it’. Lord, was he right. Thing is, Charlie is one of the few restaurateurs still buying line-caught fish straight from those who fish it, so I’m always up for what he manages to find on the day.

Tal-Familja is a guaranteed treasure trove of the best oysters too.  They are always so fresh, so ozony, so briny, so fragrant and creamy that sometimes even those in Paris pale by comparison. These people know how to source, and it shows: all these molluscs need is a squeeze of that huge wedge of lemon and nothing else. On this occasion, they were also massive – all four inches of meat of them.

I love the fact that they serve simple food, good ingredients but always twisted in such a contemporary way. Their decoration smacks of women in the kitchen: it is smart, inventive and does its job – that of making your mouth water before you’ve taken a single bite – in such a delicious way: sprigs of spring onion, strands of parsley and huge wedges of local lemon. So simple, yet so sublime.

We followed the oysters with the polpetti di neonati, flattened dumplings made of the tiniest newborn fish, crispy and crunchy and golden on the outside, creamy and gleaming white on the inside. The sfinec tal-bakkaljaw (salted haddock) were salty, crunchy and their batter dry as it should be. The clams came in a herby, garlicky juice, spot-on for dipping Tal-Familja’s crusty Maltese bread in.

The ravioli were not my favourites. I found the pasta a little heavy, the filling too overdone with potato when it was meant to be tiny capresante: overall, they lacked the fishy prawn hit. I told Roberta this later – she has no patience to wait for the review – and by the time you go, I can promise you the recipe will have changed. That’s how they are. I hope they don’t change the accompanying tiny scallops which burst in your mouth like a tiny explosion.

The scallops which followed, bigger, stronger in flavour, were worth going for just by themselves. Some time ago, one of the Iron Chefs on Iron Chef America cooked the scallop in its own shell and the judges were agog. Here the Precas do the same thing without batting an eyelid or putting make-up on for the cameras.  The moment we thought it was over, we were delivered another huge helping of razon clams. Sigh.

It was at this point that I became grateful for Charlie’s advice not to order a main course fish. I could hardly move my hand to nibble anything else. Over and above the degustation Tal-Familja always bring out a 4-section array of nibbles: garlicky, herbed beans, more garlic, but this time in the boiled local snails, bigilla (broad bean paste) as it should be, crushed and made with dark brown dried out beans, and the crunchiest bruschetta, some with tomato, some with herb topping, known to these islands.

You need to leave space for dessert, the list of which here is not reeled off by some bored waitress, but described in hungry, enthusiastic terms. I love their sherry trifle, which is gooey and moreish and so amazingly fresh: the trifle is literally your Proustian moment if you had it when you were a child. More Proustian than ever is their dessert trolley, which is the stuff of history: whenever we take the mums we can see their eyes light up when it comes out.

We usually leave when the very last patrons are leaving, for myriad reasons which include not being able to move off the chair, smoking some more (their outside space is not exactly the Maldives, but it does the job well), drinking more Averna and Limoncello, swigging more espressi (to help us depart, of course) and in most cases, chatting with the entire family.

Over these last ten years of restaurant reviewing, I have found myself recommending Tal-Familja over and over again. No matter what people tell me they want a restaurant for – whether it’s superbly fresh fish, a downright wonderful lunch or supper or taking their ‘friends from abroad’ – this is the one place I know will never let me down. The value for money is excellent, the staff superb and the family unparalleled for their kitchen and welcoming skills. Here’s to another ten years of that.