Malta – Northern Region – Dine West Restaurant

There are several dining options in Mgarr and this restaurant specialises in local dishes, pizzas and food from the grill. The branding is a little confusing from the exterior and if I hadn’t already looked it up on-line, I’d have been unsure what style of food it was offering.

The restaurant was fully booked when I went in, but the manager mentioned that a few tables weren’t booked until 13:00, so I could have one if I would be finished by then. Since it was only 12:00, I was hopeful of achieving that target, although I did drop my plan to have the octopus starter (I haven’t had octopus in a long time).

The wine menu was prohibitively expensive, and seemed out of all proportion to the food menu pricing, so I went for an orange juice, which was very affordable at just over €1.

The meat pizza, which had a deluge of toppings on and was not insubstantial in terms of its size. I like the leopard spotting on the pizza, although it might have been slightly over-done for some people. The toppings were generally of a high quality, especially the Maltese sausage which was packed with flavour. The beef was less impressive, but the chicken was tender and moist. The tomato on the base was quite sweet, but the base was a little too wet and was probably inevitable given how the toppings had been quite generous. The portion size was large and the pizza base wasn’t too heavy, but the volume of toppings certainly made it a challenge to finish it. However, I battled on and finished it all successfully.

I would have ordered another drink but no-one asked. It’s obviously a popular restaurant given their reviews and how busy it was on a Sunday, although the atmosphere was just a little over formal for me. Overall the pricing was reasonable though, just under £10 for the pizza and drink.