As a foreigner who has been visiting Malta regularly for many years and, in the process, spending what my bank manager tells me is far too much on this island’s fine restaurants, might I offer some neutral “umpiring” on the debate between Daphne Caruana Galizia and Lisa Grech.

The truth is: both ladies are right! It all depends on the angle you approach the issue from.

Lisa Grech is 100 per cent accurate in her assertion that these islands possess many splendid restaurants. I can personally vouch for many of them and, as my wife and I spend more and more time here, we plan to get acquainted with even more of them.

Equally, however, Daphne Caruana Galizia who was, after all, writing from the perspective of how Malta attracts tourists, was equally correct in her claim that eating out in Malta is not usually a particularly pleasant memory – for holiday-makers! And that emphasis is vital.

Malta’s good restaurants all have a lot in common. They are usually small. They are invariably personally run and managed and the boss is always on the premises. They concentrate on good local Mediterranean cuisine. And, finally, you don’t often see foreign holiday-makers in them.

In all the restaurants my wife and I visit regularly, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of tourists you encounter.

So Ms Grech is right: Malta has some great restaurants. And Ms Caruana Galizia is also right: most tourists find their time here a disappointing culinary experience. The tragedy is that so little is done to encourage visitors in the second category into the restaurants in the first category.

One of the core problems facing Malta’s tourist industry is that no one (least of all the responsible authorities) is doing anything like near enough to market the real Malta to tourists.

Since The Malta Independent does not publish letters several thousand words long, I won’t attempt an analysis of this issue – although I am open to offers – but a very positive start would be made if the various strata of the tourism industry here made an effort at least to understand the meaning of the phrase “commercial cooperation”.

Wylie Cunningham

Balzan