The ITS Training Restaurants Are Back in Action, and You’re Part of the Lesson Plan
The Institute of Tourism Studies (ITS) has been spitting out some serious hospitality talent. Most of the chefs you know and love, or even hate, have passed through its doors at some point. Restaurant owners, head chefs, managers, sommeliers, front-of-house. Malta’s hospitality industry has ITS fingerprints all over it, and you can catch the next generation while they’re still learning the job.
The Voyage and Runway are ITS’s two training restaurants, where students devise and execute menus, prepare drinks and run the dining room while lecturers teach, guide and occasionally correct them through a real restaurant service. Bookings for the new academic year are now open, with the first services starting on 12 October.
The menus are tied to what the students are learning and change regularly, meaning returning even the following week can bring an entirely different menu. You get to taste your way through different dishes, techniques and stages of training, while a lecturer might be showing somebody the correct way to serve something a few tables away. It’s culinary school happening in real time, except you get fed in the process.
The Voyage
The Voyage is the more formal of the two, bringing together culinary and pastry students in the kitchen with service and bar management students out front. The experience leans more towards traditional fine dining, with multi-course menus, classic service and students getting to practise things such as tableside guéridon service as part of the experience.
One week might involve a mini Spanish tortilla followed by slow-cooked pork goulash, while the next can head off somewhere completely different.
Lunch: Monday to Friday, €20 per person
Dinner: Thursday and Friday, €35 per person including a cocktail
Selected themed evenings: €40 per person
Seating: 12pm for lunch, 7:30pm for dinner
Runway, a Culinary Journey
Runway is the more casual option, with students working across the kitchen and front of house and a greater focus on fundamental culinary techniques, food presentation and drinks preparation. The format is a simpler three-course affair, with starter, main and dessert alongside bread baked in-house.
One week could mean starting with orecchiette ‘Norma’ before moving onto grouper cooked en papillote. Come back the following week and you could essentially be eating somewhere different, just with the same address.
Lunch: Monday to Friday, €15 per person
Themed dinners: Thursday and Friday, €35 per person including a cocktail
Seating: 12pm for lunch, 7:30pm for dinner
It’s part restaurant, part classroom, and probably one of the few occasions where watching somebody being corrected at work actually makes your lunch more interesting.
Reservations are now open for sittings from 12 October to 13 November 2026. Menus can be viewed here.
ITS Training Restaurants
Institute of Tourism Studies Block B, Aviation Park, Aviation Avenue
Luqa
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