Afghan Natural Food
Triq San Ġużepp
Ħamrun
Tel 7708 6710

Food: 8/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 6/10
Value: 9/10
Overall: 7/10

This could easily be a mistake. Several of my colleagues think I shouldn’t be writing this and I’m partly hesitant myself. Every one of us that shares this view is being selfish, wanting to keep this morsel of knowledge to ourselves, for fear of having to compete with others for the same food.

The rest of me wants to put these words down because the story of the two men from Afghanistan cooking traditional Afghani food in Ħamrun is too good to pass by. For starters, I realised that as long as I’ve been doing this, I’ve only dedicated half a column to food served in Ħamrun.

I’ve never quite figured out my relationship with Ħamrun. I enjoy walking through the main street, on the rare occasion that I find myself in the area with time on my hands, because it is quite the unusual one. Most of the town has dodged and swerved gentrification by a crafty combination of stealth and steely determination.

This means that the sheer variety of shops on the main road alone is a wealth in itself � a tribute to fashions and styles that span over a century and stand proud until today, many in as close to their original state as possible. There are pockets that have been modernised and I’m not sure all of the recent additions are an improvement on what there was before.

There’s also a thoroughly multicultural community that appears, to the casual observer like myself, healthily integrated. This means there’s food from several parts of the planet represented, as well. Not all of it looks great but, as today’s story clearly demonstrates, looks can be deceiving.

I’ve grown accustomed to a resigned internal groan whenever I see red and gold lanterns acting as brackets to the name of a Chinese restaurant because I can already see balls of deep-fried gunk covered with radioactive sauce and posing as sweet and sour whatnots. This is not an unfounded assumption. I’ve tried several and have been disappointed nine times out of eight so it would take quite a recommendation for me to walk into one.

The opposite applies to village snack bars. I’ve visited a couple in Ħamrun, ordered a ftira and walked out with a very happy belly and my pockets hardly any lighter than when I walked in. I now consider Chinese restaurants and snack bars to be a case in favour of stereotyping.

But how does one form an opinion about Afghan restaurants? To be quite frank, I’ve never stopped to consider Afhgan cuisine, let alone garner enough knowledge to anchor a bias. I’ve spoken at length with a close friend of mine who works in Afghanistan and he described the food to me but that’s nowhere near enough.

Let’s start with the location. There’s a border with Pakistan and another one with Iran so we can start to form a general picture of what to expect. But this also means that it has, for millennia, been a checkpoint for routes between the Mediterranean and India so it is bound to have acquired a fair share of influence from both sides.

There’s a disarming humility about the food and the way it is presented that could fool you into thinking it is merely simple

With this in mind, I decided to pay a tentative visit for lunch, taking another hungry punter with me, one I know to be twice as adventurous as I am. We walked in feeling quite hungry and were immediately enthused by the scent from the open kitchen. The chef was hard at work, adding fresh herbs to a huge saucepan and inspecting impossibly long, metal skewers that were just visible around the top rim of his tandoor.

My lunch companion and I looked at each other and simultaneously launched into that slow nod that’s reserved for ‘we might just have struck gold’. Which is a horribly anachronistic expression that harks back to a time best forgotten but you know we meant well. We placed our orders at the counter with a supremely polite man and headed upstairs to wait for our food. We were warned that the room wasn’t air conditioned but we’d been ensnared by the lovely scents and couldn’t really be bothered about the heat.

The ground floor is all occupied by the kitchen. There’s a counter that displays some of the salad, similar to the way Turkish restaurants do things but that’s where the similarities end. There’s no rotating shawarma here. Instead, there is a massive clay tandoor oven, made by the hands that are cooking your food to his own specifications.

This top-loading, circular oven reaches very high temperatures and provides a unique method of heat distribution as well as imparting its own flavour to food. You’re familiar with the word if you’ve been to Indian restaurants because ‘Tandoori chicken’, for instance, refers to the oven used to cook the meat.

A couple of days later, when waiting to pick up an order for practically half our office, a colleague and I watched as he flattened dough balls and whacked them against the inner walls of the oven where they spent all of a minute. Reaching back in, the chef pulled out perfect naan bread, cooked briefly at such a high temperature that it parts gently to the touch even when the dough is cooked through.

The upstairs room is a bit of an oddity, with mismatched tables and mismatched chairs, some of which are neatly covered in plastic sheeting. A couple of fans keep the air moving and that’s about it.

We waited for almost 40 minutes until our lamb curry and chicken tikka were served. The man who served us apologised for the wait and explained that everything they served was cooked to order. The food was well worth the wait.

I’m no fan of eating chicken breast when I’m out because I think it is so easy to cook at home but there’s no way I could achieve the tenderness and the depth of flavour that these Afghan men have magically created. The pulao style rice formed a humble and tasty accompaniment.

The lamb curry was even more interesting. During our first visit, we appreciated that it was in the form of whole shanks, cooked to a tender perfection in a sauce that was made from scratch so you come across generously chopped bits of ginger and coriander and parsley and an entire symphony of subtle aromas. It was served with their ‘special’ rice, a salad of chopped tomato and cucumber, and a sauce to go with it. There’s a disarming humility about the food and the way it is presented that could fool you into thinking it is merely simple.

This is deceptive. The next time we paid a visit was, as I mentioned, to collect a whole lot of food for the gluttons and gourmands back at the office. Seeing that we’d waited for a while the first time, I called in advance and went there a few minutes before the time they’d given me. This is when we watched the chef at work, creating lamb kebabs to order, tasting the sauces and making tiny adjustments as a result of this, preparing the naan bread there and then and pouring his knowledge and love for food into every dish.

They explained that they bought most of the ingredients locally but that certain spices had to be bought from Afghanistan. There are the ingredients for Indian food in Malta but, they insisted, there are spices and herbs that don’t overlap with Indian food. There’s a joy to be had just watching the men work and listening to them as they describe what’s going on and how they overcame challenges to be able to bring Afghan cooking to our shores.

The price is right, too. Curries, rice, and naan are priced separately and modestly. But, even if you try to, I doubt you can manage to spend a tenner and eat all the food you can buy with it. I’d mostly like to discourage you from visiting because I’m terrified of what would happen if they wind up overwhelmed by well-deserved popularity.

But if you do decide to try it out, don’t consider this to be fast food. It is cooked to order and with plenty of love, so it will take a while. I’m not taking any chances though. I’m going to eat everything on their menu before this page is published.