In the hot weather, more people are out and about, and so the complaints about restaurants get louder and louder. They’re too expensive. The food is below par. The service is chaotic. These complaints are often voiced publicly, by means of letters to newspapers. It is difficult to gauge what purpose these public complaints serve. Yes, like a pressure valve they help vent the writer’s extreme annoyance at the prevalent amateurism, which we are expected to pay for. A couple of years ago, I was so taken aback by an unbelievably hopeless cowboy operation near the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta that I wrote about the experience, something I never otherwise do. Usually, I just don’t go back, believing that the market should be allowed to regulate these matters as people’s personal standards go higher and they begin to avoid bad and mediocre restaurants.

Letters which give wide exposure to unpleasant restaurant experiences are also a way of spreading the word, and of telling others to stay away, or be disappointed and irritated. This does offer scope for abuse, because those with grudges against particular restaurant owners can write in with a stream of unfair and perhaps even untrue comments. Yet, on balance, it works out and you can’t stop the process on the grounds that some people might be lying or exaggerating.

That the food is bad or indifferent in rather too many restaurants in Malta is a truism. Even being merely good is no longer enough. Restaurants that survived for years on the patronage of the unsophisticated Maltese and tourists on cheap holidays are finding it more of a struggle now. Our knowledge of food and cooking is improving all the time; it is quite unlike what it was 10 or 15 years ago, and nothing like what it was a generation back, when people would actually go out and eat a roast chicken or a salad made of shredded lettuce and quartered tomatoes. We have access to all the ingredients, the cookery books, the television cook shows, and have learnt that food is not just fuel, but also one of life’s greatest pleasures. Because of this, we are more exacting when it comes to the food that is presented to us in restaurants. If we have made the effort to go out, and if we are paying the earnings of a day or two for what we will eat in an hour, then we expect something that we cannot or will not prepare at home as a matter of course.

This means that restaurants can no longer take the easy way out. Gone are the days when they could keep their patrons happy with a bicca huta sabiha, “a piece of nice fish”, announced by the waiter in the sort of patronising and offensive tones that suggest fish is a special treat which you only eat in restaurants. There are some restaurant patrons who haven’t yet cottoned on to the fact that fish is the quintessential fast food when you’re in a hurry to get dinner ready at home: you bung it in an oven-proof dish, you splash on some olive oil or white wine, scatter some olives, capers and chopped tomatoes, cover the whole thing in aluminium foil, then shove it into the oven for 20 minutes or less. But people are now getting used to the idea, because of diet instructions from their doctors, that fish can be eaten at home. Their idea of something special no longer constitutes a piece of grilled or steamed fish.

It’s the same with their blessed bicca fillet sabiha – another fast food standard at home – or their endless lists of pasta dishes, also on the home menu several times a week. Now tell me, why would anyone go out to eat tortellini with cream, bacon and mushrooms? Why get into a car, drive to a restaurant, hassle with parking, and then order spaghetti with tomato sauce? One day, I might understand why people do this. Encouragingly, fewer and fewer people are doing it, and then only the lower grade of patron in the lower grade of restaurant. Before long, Maltese restaurants will be forced to acknowledge that Maltese people no longer eat nothing but minestra and corned beef spaghetti at home, and when they go out, they don’t want to be confronted with a boring menu of sub-standard food.

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Opening a restaurant seems to be a national pastime. This does not make us a nation of restaurateurs, in the same way that Napoleon Bonaparte described the English as a nation of shopkeepers. The general approach to opening a restaurant here seems to be pretty much like that towards opening an ironmonger’s or a car body shop. Love of food seems not to enter the equation, and visits to one bad new restaurant after another indicate that, when the decision was taken to set up the operation, the food came last on the list of considerations. At one new restaurant in a fabulous prime location, a few days ago, the menu was so basic and uninteresting that there was only one dish I could be bothered with. Again, it was fast food, something I had made the night before when I was in a rush: capsicum peppers split in half, the seeds removed, splashed with olive oil and cooked in the oven for 15 minutes. I sat there, looked at my plate, and asked myself: “Why am I doing this? Why am I here, eating this?” The only way to make the experience worthwhile was to focus on the wine and the view. Enjoying the ambience was rather harder work. There is something about the Maltese and the outdoors, when put together. Voices become louder, the fact that the tables are out in the open air is seen as the freedom to shout over heads, people sit at all kinds of angles to the table and, perhaps as a reaction to living on an island with limited land area, take up as much space as possible. Somehow, a group of six Maltese people, especially if they are a family with children, take up more space than a group of six German people, even though the Germans are larger.

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Whenever I see a pushchair in a restaurant, I try to leave and go somewhere else. “Why, didn’t you have children yourself?” someone once made the mistake of asking me. Precisely – when I had babies in prams and pushchairs, I went out to get a break from them, and to have some adult time with my husband and friends. I would never have dreamt of carting them along complete with giant nappy bag. We got a babysitter for the evening, despatched them to my parents for the night, or we stayed at home. When you do this, you do not want to go out and find yourself surrounded by other people’s prams and their howling babies, and you certainly do not want to see somebody else’s infant, who should be at home in its cot at 10pm, being bottle-fed at a restaurant table. Now that it’s been many years since prams and pushchairs cluttered up the hall and nappies are but a blissfully distant memory, I do not want to be forced to look at other people’s babies and baby paraphernalia all evening, when I am in what should be a place for adults. There is something else I might understand one day, too: why it has become necessary over the years for mothers of infants to go around in public with giant bags that appear to contain the entire contents of the nursery, when all they need is a disposable nappy, a bottle with the powdered milk already inside it, and a jar of baby food, all of which can fit in an ordinary handbag.

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Just as babies and toddlers should be kept well away from restaurants, particularly in the evening (annoyingly, the ban on smoking has just further encouraged these parents), so they should be trained to behave properly in them as soon as they are old enough to sit up at table and handle cutlery, which is a lot earlier than some parents believe. It is beyond me why so many Maltese mothers – mothers are definitely the primary trainers in such things – believe that their children have free licence to run around tables all evening, clamouring for attention and irritating everyone else, because “they’re only children”. How I wish I would at least once hear a mother, as the whine of “Arani, ma!” goes up for the 15th time, tell her brat: “We’re not here to look at you, and neither is anyone else. Come here and sit down.”

If properly brought up, a five year-old is able to sit at table, eat properly and even make conversation. A 10-year-old who cannot do so is an unforgivable failure on the parents’ part, and an unbearable annoyance to everyone else in the restaurant. If a child can read, then he can read a menu. If he can choose a toy in a shop, then he can choose a dish off a list. If he can build a Lego tower, then he can clean his own fish. If he can work out which buttons to press on a remote control, then he can learn to use cutlery properly. If he is included in the conversation like a small adult, then he will respond accordingly. And if he is exposed to different kinds of food from an early age, then he will eat it, instead of making ignorant gagging sounds and shouting “Yaqq!”, or worse, spitting food directly onto his plate in front of everyone else.

After leaving them at home as babies when we went out, I took my sons to restaurants as often as I could from when they were the age of four. I regarded it as part of their education and training. They knew they were expected to behave, and they did. I’d go through the menu with them and talk about the different dishes and what they might like to choose. They learned rapidly, and have remained very interested in food. Once, at a restaurant in Gozo, the owner took my order and voiced his assumption that it would be three hamburgers and chips for the boys, then aged around six, eight and nine. They placed their orders – pigeon, quail and octopus – and he burst out in disbelieving laughter.

It may come as a surprise to many of the parents I see on summer evenings out, who let their children scramble all over the place while they talk to each other and ignore them as they would pet animals, but children can and should be socialised. They are only tolerable in restaurants, where they are surrounded by strangers rather than by relatives who look on them fondly, if they behave. I am afraid that one day I may no longer be able to fight down the urge to stand up, walk over to the seven-year-old who is rolling all over the restaurant floor with his six-year-old cousin, and snap “Get up off that floor, go to your chairs and keep quiet!”