Vegan Eating In Malta

(EDIT 2016: When I visited Malta in 2012, I had only recently become a vegan and wasn't as strict or wise as I could have been, so I would thoroughly recommend ASKING what is in a meal before ordering and not just trusting that something listed as vegetarian sounds like it is probably vegan too.)

My advice to anyone travelling abroad and worried about vegan or even just vegetarian eating would be to stay somewhere where you can cook your own meals – that way you can bring food with you from home and buying basic dinner staples shouldn’t be that difficult anyway.  It’s finding places to eat out where the difficulty usually begins (even before going on holiday).

Before I went to Malta I was not confident of being able to find anything to eat.  All the advice I read stated that Malta is not a country that understands vegetarianism, doesn’t make main courses without meat, national dishes are fish and rabbit, and it has a heavy culture of bird hunting to the point where hunters break in and trash the nature reserves.

However, I actually had no trouble eating here at all.

I researched places that might serve vegans before I left, using both the Internet and guidebooks, so was certain I would find at least one place to eat.

I ate breakfast at The Hotel each morning, made a packed lunch each day and had dinner at restaurants in the evening.

Breakfast was huge, though with no way of knowing the ingredients of most dishes, I was limited to a range of fruit salad and jam on a range of breads.  I swear the jam was just coloured sugar.  This was still a bigger breakfast than I’d have at home and due to the heat I wasn’t as hungry as I would be normally anyway.  If I had really wanted, I could have brought vegan milk and butter to breakfast and had a far bigger meal, though I would have had to pay to have my mini bar emptied so I could use it as a fridge.

I packed quite a few emergency snacks in The Suitcase and on The First Day I stopped in Park Towers Supermarket in St Julian’s to buy lunch supplies for The Week.  This is a good supermarket, with all the usual supplies including vegan butters, milks and yoghurts.  I spent €15 on this and had more than enough food to make lunch every day.  Too much in fact.  And sometimes I saved fruit or bread from breakfast to add even more to lunch.

In St Julian’s there is a health food shop called Good Earth that has even more vegan supplies (vegan cheese and tofu etc), useful if you are preparing your own dinners (which I wasn’t), and I saw a Holland & Barrett’s in both Paceville and Valletta.  So buying food was very easy and it was all perfectly well labelled, just like in England.

I was pleasantly surprised that many restaurants in St Julian’s and around clearly listed vegetarian meals on their menus (I love the V), though a careful read of The Ingredients was still needed in case they think fish is a plant, or in one baffling case, bacon. 

Most meals in the places I was looking were between €8 and €12.

I ate at Parapet, which was on the corner of Triq San Gorg and Triq Gort in Paceville.  It had very friendly and helpful waiters although The Food took several years to arrive.  I chose this place because it actually listed vegan food on The Menu.  However this turned out to be a choice of one starter and one main course.  I had The Main, linguini with tomato, olives and breadcrumbs.  It was okay, though I don’t like eating linguini (or spaghetti) in public as I don’t know how to do it neatly, and I don’t actually like tomato or olives.  Maltese meals are HUGE and I didn’t once see someone finish a whole meal.  The waiter did offer me parmesan, which I easily declined, and The Complimentary Bread came with a bowl of slop which they forgot to mention wasn’t vegetarian.  I’m not foolhardy enough to taste food before knowing what is in it, thankfully, and when pressed The Waiter did admit it wasn’t vegetarian as it had a hint of anchovies.  So it was cat food.

Parapet

I had to eat here again because The Brother loved the place so much (said his meal (beef) was the best thing he’d ever eaten).  This time I had The Starter with a side salad.  The Starter was bruschetta, so it was basically four very small pieces of toast piled high in tomatoes.  The salad was basic and really nice.  I was given a can of olive oil (that looked like lighter fluid), which I wasn’t sure if it was for The Salad or The Starter.  I figured The Starter, as bruschetta often comes with dipping oils, but others thought it was The Salad.  I am not one to ruin good fresh vegetables with mank though, so I used it for The Starter, even though it was already slightly oiled.  This did make it more edible, but it wasn’t much of a meal.

Parapet again

I ate at Paparazzi, which was on Triq San Gorg, right on Spinola Bay in St Julian’s, which is unfortunately part of the same building as Meat & Co, whose menu actually has pictures of lumps of meat.  Paparazzi’s menu has the theme of classic Hollywood, which is a hoot, but the theme isn’t really carried on indoors.  There’s a range of seating areas, though the service isn’t amazing.  There are quite a few vegetarian choices, so I had ‘Stormy’ which is their vegetarian burger.  This is a bean and nut burger with cheese and hot tomato sauce on pita, with chips and salad.  I ordered it sans cheese.  The Burger was almost as big as The Head, but it was gorgeous.  I even liked the sauce, which was more like sweet chilli than tomato and nicely complemented The Burger, the toasted pita was just right and the chips were good.  The only flaw in the meal was that the salad was very small and mostly covered in mank (coleslaw), but I forgave it for The Delightful Burger.  The Eternal Regret is I only got halfway through it before my appetite was sated.  I wanted to come back here, but due to a bad stomach later in the holiday, I wasn’t able to, except once when all I had was a small pot of chips.

Paparazzi

On Vittoriosa/Birgu waterfront I found Tate Café, which I sought out because it is one of only two vegetarian restaurants on the island (though it has absolutely no sign indicating this either on the building or menu which is disappointing) (the other is Angka Café in Marsa, which I passed twice on The Bus but never had time to stop at).  It wasn’t very welcoming.  I sat right on the waterfront and had Mexican Rice, which was okay, but I couldn’t eat all of it.  The waitress, who didn’t give amazing service, did offer to let me take the rest away with me, but I didn’t fancy cold rice and had no way of heating it up.  After the meal, I popped into the toilet (ladies’ was broken so had to use the men’s) and then both members of staff had vanished and new people had been seated at my table.  I could very easily have walked out without paying.  In fact, I had to go out of my way TO pay.  I regretted The Tip.

Outside The Hotel in St Julian’s there was an ice cream shop that had a soya ice, but it was vanilla flavour, which is too boring.  So I went to Bugibba specifically to go to the ice cream shop SottoZero, 44 Spring Street.  It took a while to find even though it is just off the main part of The Seafront because I walked the wrong way into town from the bus stop.  They had five varieties of vegan ice cream, all exciting flavours and colours.  I had the one called ‘cookies and rice’, which seemed to be ‘cookies and cream’.  It was very nice, although I don’t actually like ice cream much, and I was only having it because it was vegan. 

Yes, my phone focused on the ground rather than the ice cream...

Perhaps vegan eating would be harder in small traditional villages, but in big tourist areas there are many restaurants that cater to many tastes, and I could always find ones that listed vegetarian meals and then it’s just a matter of picking ones that can be easily converted to vegan.

It was no harder eating vegan in Malta than it is in England, you just have to look in The Right Places.

P.S. Although the water in Malta is ‘safe’, I had read that it is still recommended to drink bottled water, so I bought bottles from the supermarket for very cheap and this worked out fine.  However, one day I drank some water from a bottle provided by the hotel and after this I got a sick stomach, which ruined several day trips as I was constantly having to find the nearest toilet and didn’t want to eat much for the rest of the holiday.  The Moral is don’t drink from mysterious bottles that suddenly materialise in your room one day.  However, no one else was affected and they drank this stuff, so I can’t even be 100% that was what made me ill.