If you speak to anybody in the Maltese catering industry, the one thing you will hear over and over is that ‘you can’t get the staff these days’. Now I’m not that young – in that I’m over 18 – and I do not ever recall having decent restaurant staff to work with on the island. Twenty years ago they were abysmal, their skills, um, ‘unique’; these days they are abysmal, still with the unique skills but sometimes also toting an ITS certificate in their sweaty palms.

Obviously, generalisations, like comparisons, are odious, but if we, the paying diners, visit one restaurant after the other and at each one we get un-skilled University students doing a ‘summer job’, bitter early-twenties who did not manage to get a single O-level, and unsupported professionals who are sick and tired of bad management and over-paid, under-enthused chefs, then there is something seriously wrong going on.

Many local restaurateurs, especially the ones who do not have long-standing (and loyal) professional Maltese staff working for them, complain about the level of person seeking employment. Basic linguistic skills, including communication in Maltese, is inexistent. I have been served by ‘only English speaking’ Maltese teens who turn their noses up at me, the customer paying their hourly wage, because I will not twist my mouth for Maltglish.

So restaurant managers are increasingly operating with a foreign crew, which is basically what London ones have been doing for a long time now. This does not come without its massive risks: they are mostly foreign students living the foreign student life. You can book a couple of Spaniards to come in tomorrow and five minutes before service, if they can be bothered to, they will call you and tell you they have a headache. Mostly they do not call because they don’t want to use up their pre-paid phone credit for anything but messaging their mates. And there you are, with ten tables booked and nobody to serve them.

In most cases, foreign waiters and waitresses at least have an idea of real and really good food. We are currently reaping the rewards of years of nothing being done to promote and entrench within our culture the concept of decent eating and quality local ingredients eaten in the home. We are served supposedly high-level food by staff who have consumed nothing but chicken nuggets and whose idea of haute cuisine is microwaved ‘cheese’ on their big mac.

Entrenching culinary techniques and waiting within the Institute of Tourism Studies has a lot to answer for: by attaching food and serving knowledge to a tourism-oriented education, we have created a culture of ‘service for tourists’. This was bound to fail, and it has.

At the Riviera della Marina this situation is very sadly obvious. On a supposedly quiet night, the place was packed with foreigners. The reason is simple: the Maltese know that it is almost impossible to get a good quality supper at either the Vittoriosa or Valletta waterfronts, so these days, they stay away.

We were welcomed by the one good waiter in the place: he was friendly without being obtrusive, jolly yet superbly calm when we could not decide which table we wanted. Sadly, after that, it went a little downhill.

The one female waitress barked at us, for no reason whatsoever. I kept noticing her, with her frustrated and bitter little ways, as she stared daggers at her customers. To say that she didn’t smile is really making an understatement: she looked like she wanted to stab people with their own fish knife and then refuse to change it for a clean one.

Another guy was obviously doing this for the first time in his life. He didn’t know what had hit him. We had ordered a ‘fish platter’ to share to start off with. He approached from my left (The Writer was sitting to my right) and plonked the plate in front of me. ‘Um, excuse me, is this for the both of us’ I asked. He stared at me as if I had asked him what size bra his grandmother wore. His hair was in that post-teen, trying to grow-out, almost-bob-but-not-quite fashion, slicked down with loads of gel. It looked dirty. The restaurant must be desperate.

He had not been trained at all. He had no idea what was on that plate. My question threw him. ‘Um, I don’t know’ he said, almost wailing with mental anguish. ‘Can you check please’ I replied, simply wanting a couple of plates so that we could shift the items from the ‘plate to share’ to our individual space. It was as if I had released him from prison after twenty years: he simply ran away and never returned.

Five minutes later we managed to grab the eye of another waiter. We asked the same question. He also ran away never to come back. Was this query so amazingly difficult to ask the kitchen or the management? Apparently so because at one point, I just stood up and called the manager, who, although much more experienced than them, must be cursing himself with the staff he has ended up with. He immediately brought us the individual plates, a full ten minutes after our starter had arrived.

The bizarre thing is that, TW’s grumbling and insistence that we should have gone to Tal-Familja (he was so right) notwithstanding, the food was actually good. Not mind-blowingly good, but extremely decent and full of flavour. The tuna was fragrant, the dressing spot on, the fresh anchovies sublime and ever-so- slightly vinegary, the mussels soft, and well, the lone clam lonely. One clam in a dish for two? I’ve worked in plenty of restaurants and still recall the filching of shellfish by staff who have been fed last night’s leftovers as standard behind-the-scenes behaviour.

After this, we waited a full 35 minutes for the mains to turn up. The manager had very honestly declared that the fish on the menu was farmed (as it well would be - you don’t know what wild fish you’ll have on any given day so that goes with the ‘specials’) but that the fish in the refrigerated counter was all wild.

We also asked for ‘real chips’, if they had them. Nobody bothers with the real stuff these days, preferring to bulk buy tasteless oven crap. ‘I think the kitchen still has some home-peeled chips. I’ll check’. This was never confirmed so for the thirty five minutes, I lived in hope. ‘It’s just a couple of potatoes’ TW said ‘How difficult is it to peel and cut those?’. ‘These days kitchens don’t buy potatoes’ I told him in my infinite wisdom ‘They buy packets’.

As it turned out, the accjola steak was quite sublime, flakey and very tender. TW’s barracuda was a copious quantity (fish is €4.50 per 100 grams so big fish portions works to the restaurant’s financial advantage) and although the meat on that is much tighter, it still had a distinctive and mellow flavour. The salads on the side were boring and undressed. And the hand-cut and peeled chips were fantastic. I’d go back just for those.

Desserts were a reel-off of blah blah blah cake and blah blah blah cake (from one of the waiters) plus the mantra of chocolate/strawberry/vanilla ice cream. We were simply not interested so we had a coffee, which tasted of burnt peanuts. The bill, including a €16 euro quite-decent bottle of Insolia came to €80, including a bottle of still water which we never had. We had to wait some more until they had the bill re-done, for the principle, more than the three euro or whatever the water cost.

Somewhere in that kitchen there is a decent chef who knows his fish waiting to come out. I suggest he sticks to what he knows best as he may find that the front of house is being decimated by a bunch of amateurs who really should be doing something else. I pity the chef, the manager and the one good waiter: the stars are for them because the other staff have stolen three.