A dinner was held recently at Ta’ Frenc Restaurant in celebration of St George’s Day. This was the first function to be arranged in the recently converted wine cellar of this award-winning restaurant.

Proposing a toast to the memory of the Saint, Revel Barker said that although St George was generally overlooked in England, he was also largely ignored (apart from one large parish in Rabat, Gozo) locally, and few Maltese were aware that St George was also the patron saint of Malta and Gozo. According to the Vatican, the speaker said, St George’s patronage included agricultural workers, archers, armourers, Boy Scouts, butchers, Canada, cavalry, chivalry, Crusaders, England (by Pope Benedict XIV), farmers and field hands, Genoa (Italy), Georgia, Germany, Gozo, Greece, horsemen, Istanbul, knights, Lithuania, Malta, Moscow, Palestine, Portugal, saddle makers, soldiers, and Venice, as well as sufferers of herpes, leprosy and plague.

In the 16 th century, St George’s Day in England was celebrated as a feast second only to Christmas, but nowadays more Englishmen celebrated St Patrick’s Day, just as St George was greatly overshadowed in Malta by the feasts for St Paul and St John.

The dinner – traditional English fare including roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – inaugurated the new function room at Ta’ Frenc. The 36 diners sat at a single table surrounded by vintage wines beneath a hand-painted fresco of Bacchus. Welcoming the guests, Ta’ Frenc director Ino Attard said that the facility was now available for similar functions for private parties.