Taste Restaurant at Fortina Spa, Malta: So good we kept going back

9th to 19th January.
I have reviewed the Fortina Spa hotel about a year ago, and the fact that we return here says something about the food, which is pretty good in the a la carte section of the hotel. If you go all inclusive in the hotel, you can use any of the restaurants from the a la carte menu's within your budget. Actually that is not exactly true, as the hotel seems to have sold off two of the restaurants as a franchise, the Indian and the Japanese. These now prefer proper paying customers, and the AI guest suffer a bit of discrimination. Firstly they can only use them with booking ahead (limit to the number of guests each day) and the menu you see is not the same one as the cash customers. We also saw the scenario that guests who had not booked were turned away even if the restaurant was empty. This is a strange thing, and given that they are in the hospitality business, this is not hospitable. Nevertheless, the food in all the restaurants except the Italian, which I will not go to, is excellent.
This review focuses on one restaurant, the Taste, which is the flagship Vietnamese Mediterranean fusion. This is probably one of the favourite restaurants for residents, and rightly so. We ate there several times over the period, and I will show some of the dishes. The restaurant has a fairly short menu of about 6 or 7 starters and the same for entree. This is supplemented by a special menu of the day which always has special starter and main including fish of the day. The desert menu, like many restaurants in Malta is poor with no variation, and during a week of staying and eating, you would have to repeat or even forego desert.

Veal wrapped in ham

pasta with porcini mushrooms

fish and chips

By and large, the service is good, especially when they get to know you. Hotness is rarely an issue and most dishes scored between 8 and 8.8 but rarely hotter. As you can see, there is much arranging of food, and he appearance is critically important. On first glance, portion sizes are not big, but by the time you have had some bread, starter main and desert, there if plenty enough food. I had one occasion where there was some bone or plastic in a terrine, and I was immediately offered an alternate starter. It is easy to see why the place is popular.

It is difficult to put a price on the cost of a meal through all inclusive, but cash customers can pay an average of about 35 euros for a meal without drink. This is probably a bit on the high side, but it is the sort of price that the better restaurants in Malta are charging. I heard some complaints such as not enough white fish on the menu: there is a fresh fish of the day but salmon, tuna, shark and swordfish are quite common.  One tip is that you can ask for chips rather than the sauteed potatoes that come by default, and very good they are too, an usually very hot.