The Valletta Waterfront and the Senglea Waterfront. The first came alive at great expense and is a showcase for our talent for building cum restoration. We are managing to excel in restoration while our ancestors excelled building wise, thankfully giving us a heritage which is almost our unique selling point, and starting point, for anything our tourists can hope to enjoy here.

The other, the Senglea Waterfront, has been there for ages, and received much, much less, if anything at all in the way of embellishment. Yet where do you get better service, better value for money and a whole list of other betters? Try them both and see.

The Valletta Waterfront is spectacularly beautiful, but a year on, it’s indicative of the Maltese disease. Great building, lousy service. Or it shows how good we are at starting things, but we’re not so keen on the finishing – the only exception to this being our pristine homes which are, if they are lived in anyway, finished and maintained to a degree of care, expense and perfection you won’t see anywhere else. And where the service... as most Maltese husbands, partners and kids will attest, is second to none, thanks to a stoically proud group of dedicated Maltese housewives and mothers.

Whenever I go to the Valletta Waterfront (though there might be one restaurant that is an exception to all this, and as I haven’t tried them all, please ignore this description, it doesn’t apply to them or to you!) the service is very poor, and you wait ages and ages, even for a drink.

The young and sweet staff do their best, but you can often tell they have just not been at it long. A place like that merits better-trained staff than students or whoever is filling in for a few weeks, at least I hope that’s what they are doing. Because if they are full-time trained staff still unable to cope a year or more on, they are either just beyond the school report of good-but-could-do-better, or else their management needs a wake up call, or perhaps they are just grossly understaffed, and can’t cope if the place is more than half full?

Perhaps the same staff are there all year round? If so, something must be very wrong over there because the service is as slow as ever. Initially, I just put it down to teething problems, and waiting 30 minutes for a warm glass of white wine just a shaky start, but not a lot has improved there. And, of course, prices are high, so you do expect to get better service and quality.

Across the harbour in Senglea the story is very different. Equivalent wines sell for much less. The food is plentiful and reasonably priced. A new pizzeria called Tal-Barklor is teeming, and no wonder. The pizzas are laden with goodness. In fact, what arrives is better than the description on the menu, which is such a rare pleasure these days, and as it should be really.

At the Valletta Waterfront on the other hand, a Parma ham salad is as problematic as salads are all over Malta. A huge bowl of lettuce with a few shavings of Parma ham on top and a tomato and a grape and a slice of cucumber gracing the side. It looked pretty enough but most of it was lettuce and people don’t want to pay a fiver sterling plus for a bowl of lettuce do they? Whereas in Senglea you get plentiful ingredients whatever you order.

Ok, even there salads are still caught in the fish and chips brigade time warp, and all over Malta and Gozo, we have not cottoned on to the fact that people expect a different kind of salad today, but at least you’re not being ripped off for having a product which is 20 years out of date?

Senglea and much of Cottonera are really beautiful jewels. It’s a great atmosphere even for our tourists who can see the nice side of real Malta there, and also can enjoy good value for money and a great view. Those restaurateurs there deserve encouragement and funding too. If I was a tourist, I would enjoy an evening at the Senglea Waterfront much more than the Valletta Waterfront. Well done to all those at the former who can show the rest of our over priced tourist product what is needed here to keep tourists even coming back, or have we given up on that altogether?

The Senglea Waterfront should show us that what is good enough and good for the Maltese will be appreciated by the tourist too. Instead, we have an expensively converted Valletta Waterfront which even has a Paceville-type bar now too, posturing as a haven for the sophisticated, when the presence of such bars as well as the expensive and not good value for money food and service let it all down terribly

Keeping tourists, and hoping they will recommend these islands to their friends is in the detail. Ostensibly the Valletta Waterfront symbolises our new brand values of “Heritage, Diversity and Hospitality” but just like the advert (you know, the one with the girl with a George Cross painted on her face asking us all to look after our product in English when 95 per cent plus of us are Maltese speaking first, but that’s another story!) which is written in very poor and bombastic English, it is still not living up to the hype.

Good but could do much better…like the Parma ham salad, too little ham (and not all of it Parma ham either) and way, way too much costly lettuce!

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