Il Pirata St Julian’s: Two Floors, Two Moods and a Menu With Range

Five years, four months and one reopening later, Il Pirata St Julian’s has finally returned. It opened. I gave them a week to locate the cutlery and for the paint to dry, then went in.

A small caveat before we begin: I’m generally reluctant to judge a restaurant too severely during its first month. Opening a restaurant is controlled panic with a reservations book. Systems need bedding in, staff need time to find their rhythm and there will inevitably be things that work rather better in theory than they do on a busy Friday night.

Food, however, still has to be good.

Fortunately, most of this was very good indeed.

Fire and Ice…

 

The new Il Pirata is split across two floors and Claudio and Alfredo Spiteri Debarro have not exactly approached the refurbishment timidly.

 

Upstairs is the calmer sibling: pale grey banquettes, dark wood, patterned armchairs, arched openings and enough space between tables to have a conversation without inadvertently joining somebody else’s.

 

Then there’s downstairs. Burnt terracotta walls, heavily veined black-and-white flooring, mirrored surfaces, curved booths, draped fabric overhead, a vast mural and enough neon to suggest somebody has plans after dinner.

 

Even the bathrooms have entered negotiations with nightlife: one door says BAD GIRL, another BAD BOY, while elsewhere you’re instructed to DO EPIC S.H.I.T.

Subtle, it is not.

 

But the contrast works. Upstairs feels like somewhere you could take your mother for lunch — or, if you’re anything like me, settle in before Paceville starts getting ideas after dark.

 

Downstairs is another proposition entirely: the sort of place you book with a group when dinner is merely the opening act and nobody has any intention of going home afterwards. Less The Godfather, more The Talented Mr Ripley if Dickie Greenleaf had discovered lounge bars.

Now, The Important Bit

 

The menu remains Mediterranean with a decidedly Italian backbone, but the Crudi section immediately caused problems. Specifically, the sort where I wanted most of it.

 

We started with the Tartare di Salmone and Tartare di Tonno, alongside Gamberi Rossi and Langoustines.

 

The raw seafood was immaculate. Not “fresh” in the meaningless menu-copy sense, but clean-tasting, sweet and handled with enough restraint that you could still tell what you had ordered. This matters particularly with good raw seafood. If you’ve paid for a beautiful red prawn, the last thing it needs is twelve other ingredients climbing on top of it demanding attention.

The tuna was the surprise.

 

The menu describes foie gras cream, although I was told the sauce served with mine was a spicy mayo. This presented something of a personal crisis because I cannot stand mayonnaise. I looked at those generous lines of sauce with roughly the enthusiasm normally reserved for an unexpected tax bill. And then it was my favourite.

Rich tuna, heat from the sauce and the crunch underneath made considerably more sense in the mouth than they had in my head. My guest preferred the other crudi. Excellent. More tuna for me.

 

Then came the Calamari Fritti: Adriatic baby squid given the lightest coating of semolina and rice flour and flash-fried.

This is where frying technique earns its keep. The coating was crisp and delicate rather than the thick golden overcoat calamari is so often forced to wear. You could see the squid. You could taste the squid. An apparently modest achievement that a surprising number of kitchens fail to manage.

 

The Crocchette di Gamberi e Baccalà followed: king prawn and cod croquettes in a panko crust, served with tarragon beurre blanc and black-ink mayo. Crisp shell, soft savoury centre, properly seasoned. Three disappeared with indecent speed.

One Kilogram Was Apparently Necessary

 

For the main, I shared the 1kg Tagliata.

And yes, one kilogram of beef arriving at the table does have a certain Roman-emperor quality to it.

The flap meat came sliced and covered generously with rucola, cherry tomatoes and Grana, with roasted potatoes alongside. Personally, I would have liked the beef a shade pinker, and I’d have been happier with rather less happening on top of it. Not because the accompaniments didn’t work, but because meat this good doesn’t require camouflage.

Once excavated from beneath its leafy hat, though, the beef spoke perfectly well for itself: deeply savoury, tender without surrendering its texture, and with the sort of proper beef flavour that makes elaborate sauces feel unnecessary.

By this point dessert was an act of poor judgement rather than hunger, so naturally I ordered it. Go for the brownie . That is all.

Il Pirata hasn’t returned as a carbon copy of the restaurant that closed in 2021. The bones are familiar — Italian and Mediterranean food, serious seafood, pasta, fish and meat — but St Julian’s now has considerably more theatre around it.

And crucially, the theatre hasn’t wandered into the kitchen and started interfering.

I went barely a week after opening expecting at least a few rough edges. There were some. There always are. But the ingredients were excellent, the cooking largely knew when to interfere and, more importantly, when not to.

Turns out, reopening the doors was the least interesting part.

Il Pirata Restaurant 
41 Triq Paceville
St Julian’s
Website