Terrazzo

The finest view on this list, wrapped around its least coherent plate: sausage, cheese and beef, none of them on speaking terms.

The review

Everything around the food is faultless — terraces stacked above Xlendi Bay, the sun dropping into the water, herbs from the restaurant's own Gozitan fields. Then the tartare arrives and the evening deflates. 'Local Twisted' is the menu's phrase, and the twist is sausage folded through the raw beef: fat, spice and cure that flatten the meat into an anonymous, faintly greasy paste. Peppered ġbejniet pile salt on salt until nothing tastes of beef at all. What should be the spine of the dish — cold, clean, mineral raw meat — never appears; you eat texture and seasoning, and neither is pleasant. The focaccia is genuinely good, which by that point reads as an insult. I wanted to love this: the local-produce ambition is honourable and the room is a postcard. But ambition is not execution, and this was the plate that made me stop ordering tartare on Gozo.

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