I get loads of letters from you. Some are funny, others interesting, and others could be passed on straight to the police and the local mental institutions. Like some omnipresent mum, I try not to have favourites although I do have a terrible soft spot for the ones that make me laugh. It’s nice to keep perspective and humour when supposedly being ripped off. The majority of your letters could easily be written from the following template, which can be downloaded and saved as dearmona.dot

Dear Mona,

Just last week I went to The Rip Off Restaurant in Shanty Town/Madville/Bugibba (delete as appropriate). The owner was abusive/slimy/badly dressed, the atmosphere dull/rowdy/oppressive and the staff unhappy/underage/had spiky hair. The food was bad from start to finish and we would have been better off heating a microwave meal at home.

Please go there and tell us what you think.

Miss/Ms/Mrs. X

Lovelyplace

Since I pay my way like everybody else, I try to steer clear of places you tell me are terrible. Wouldn’t you do the same thing? I don’t know anyone who would voluntarily opt to donate money to someone that’s trying to steal it. I’m even sceptical of the suggestions my friends make. I know very few people with my kind of harsh and ever-so-slightly uncompromising tastes.

If most of you think that the food they’re paying for is a bad deal, then you should try working in a restaurant. One of the supposed ‘perks’ of that kind of job is that you get a staff meal thrown in for free. When you’re making all of LM1.50 an hour to slog it at the tables for the entire night, anything you don’t have to pay for is a godsend.

Or is it? Most staff meals are invariably pasta. One particular restaurant I worked for, where the food is consistently delicious, would have us all sitting on the basement steps in the company of a few roaches, shuttling down forkfuls of last night’s leftovers tossed with the cheapest packet of pasta on the market. We would pay the owner’s lack of generosity back by stealing morsels (scallops, clams, whole steaks) from his diners’ plates before serving them. Another was at least altruistic enough to let us choose the cheapest items off the menu. We found out a little too late that it was only to check the level of food-poisoning available in the night’s food; our visits to the loo were witness to the fact.

And when the chefs themselves want a quick bite to eat, they rarely prepare something in the restaurant kitchen. For them, all the food around them is work, not (as I see it) a palette of edible delights and a free market. Most of them have to justify the quantities they use with their bosses (although I’m sure quite a few cow legs have made it out of the back door) or with themselves, when they own the place.

At the end of a steamy night toiling over the hot-plates with the salamander fuming in front of their faces, all these people want, is, apparently, a good quantity of fast food, made as quickly as possible, and served with minimum discussion. One of Malta’s finest purveyors of cooked food actually says he enjoys nothing else but a Big Mac. Well, at least he did, until he realised he was putting on too much weight. Another one told me that the best place to unwind after a mad night was at Millenium Kebab House. ‘It’s the freshest, fastest place you’ll find’ she insisted.

And I’m sure we’ve all been in that situation. One the way home, DVD safely ensconsed in the handbag as we forego nights out for quiet nights in, when the last thing we feel like doing is starting to cook. The thing is: can fast food ever be healthy, appetizing and not leave a tell-tale smell of putrifying meat in the car by the time we arrive? These are the kinds of existential questions I’m faced with during the melting months of summer.

So I took her advice, which, as you’ll agree, was a notch up from telling me how bad it was and that I should go. The first thing I saw on the walls of Millenium were the pictures of booked cars parked on the double yellow lines just outside. The Gzira local council has installed cameras ‘in the area’ to ‘protect’ its citizens and will happily recoup their cost from your hard-headedness. I rushed out and moved the car.

The second thing is how clean this place is. It’s not pretty, but then, you don’t expect it to be. And the restaurant inside, although airconditioned, is really the kind of place you’d sit in only if you were so hungry you couldn’t wait to go home to eat. Otherwise, it gleams.

The third thing was the incredible array of salads. Whereas most kebab houses have almost given up on the side-dishes, and given in to their patron’s penchant for junk at all costs, this one has really gone out of its way to please Atkins pedants like me. There are loads, and The Writer and I tried them all, over consecutive days just to see if the level varied (of course). The ones I didn’t touch, he demolished, and vice versa.

His first reaction was that the Onion Salad was really hot, but then he realised just in time that that was because the hot sauce had dribbled all over it. I absolutely love their Aubergine one which consists of the purple vegetable stewed with tomatoes. The Red Cabbage was fresh and crunchy and the coleslaw on just the right side of creamy. The couscous was a gentle blend, rather than tooth-breaking versus stick-in-the-throat.

I loathed the pasta salad which was made of those little round rings and laced with mayonnaise, but TW loved it. The Mushroom salad had mushrooms coming out of the tin, which is ever so bad, but the lashings of fresh parsley saved it just in time. And I absolutely adore their Tunisian Salad which is a mix of diced tomato, cucumber and peppers, onion and garlic, again, heaped with fresh parsley. All the salads were very obviously fresh.

And that’s just the sides. The first time we tried it out, we had the Koftes, those spheres of spiced and minced lamb, which were so juicy, I couldn’t believe they came from a corner take-away in Gzira, and which were the reason I went back. Then I tried the chicken breast which was so tender I wondered whether they’d marinaded it or laced it in tenderiser. I suspect the former. This time ‘round, we tried the Beef, Lamb and Chicken Shish (or is that Shishes?). All, but exceptionally the lamb (as is its want, being a fatty meat) were succulent and juicy. Even the burger was good, although at 85c, they should make it fatter and charge LM1 for it. Their hot sauce is fiery, the sweet sauce a nice rejoinder and the hummous slightly too runny, but still tastes great.

We eschewed the chips, which I’m sure nobody else does. It would have been out of this world if Millenium were actually peeling their own potatoes like they still do at Frances Borda’s in Birzebbuga, and though on their photos the fries are steak-cut, in reality they’re thin. The difference between the fat ones and the string ones you buy at the fast-food chains are that the smaller a potato is cut, the more oil it absorbs, and hence, its fat-making potential (apart from the fact that you don’t even realise you’re eating it, and therefore eat more).

The pitta bread smelled so gorgeous in the car that we started to nibble it there and then, which was a good thing, because by the time we drove home, placed everything artistically on the plates, poured the diet (!) cokes in fake Coca-Cola Tal-Lira Glasses, put the dvd in, fed the dog, controlled the cat from eating her food, and plumped the sofa cushions, it was cold and hard.

The aftershock of most kebab houses around the island takes many forms. The car usually reeks of week-old rubbish bags, for, well, a week after you’ve transported it. You spend the next day making sure that every meeting is held close to a public convenience. And of course, there’s always the cost, which you’d planned to be cheap, but which ends up being five times the amount you’d originally thought it would be.

Well, having conducted thorough and continuous research into the situation, I can now report, sans raincoat and pipe, that my car smells of Tweety Air Freshener and stale cigarettes like it did before, the loos of the land were free of our inspections, and the 3 take-away boxes stuffed tight with real food, 2 diet cokes and a yukky strawberry juice (I’m prone to moments of madness like everyone else) cost us the princely sum of LM7.25. If we didn’t take chips, they didn’t charge us for them, which is so nice. If they’d had the Turkish Sweet of the Day like they should have, I would have bought that too.

I only have one word of warning and I address it to the hard-working guys, ever-smiling guys at Millenium: every time I’ve written about a kebab house (twice in three years), it has invariably gone to the dogs (the poor animals). The Istanbul at the top of Savoy Hill is a translucent shadow of its former self, offering exceptionally rude ‘service’ and tough meat, Aslantis has become way too expensive (half of all of the above for LM8 something) although the service is still charming. Even the ones I never wrote about but which were enduringly popular, like the one next to Snoopy’s, has really lost the culinary plot. Please Millenium, don’t do the same thing.

And now I know why we used to eat such bad staff meals. With chef knowing that he would be getting himself a kebab after service, he probably thought we should be doing the same thing.