Bert's Is Closing: Valletta Lost Its Memory
Decades of the same smells, the same counter, the same ritual.
Bert's takeaway is closing in September. That sentence should not require elaboration in Malta, but for those who need it: this is one of Valletta's oldest surviving food institutions, the kind of place that has fed dock workers, civil servants, students, and the occasional minister who preferred not to be seen in a proper restaurant. Decades of the same smells, the same counter, the same ritual. Gone.
It arrives in the same week that a film called *Of Soil and Sea*, written by Clare Agius, won an international award for celebrating Gozo's food traditions and its island producers. The irony is almost too neat. We celebrate what we preserve on screen while allowing what we actually have to disappear without ceremony.
Valletta is good at this. It has become expert at the performance of heritage — the plaques, the festivals, the UNESCO coordinates — while quietly allowing the living tissue of the city to be replaced by something more photogenic and less inhabited. Bert's was not photogenic. It was real. There is a difference, and we are running out of it.
Elsewhere, the question of the week that nobody with power seems willing to answer: who owns the dangerous guard-rail along Valletta's ring road? Malta Public Transport says it is not their responsibility. The Roads Authority says something similar. The philanthropist and deputy mayor who raised the alarm are still waiting. A low railing along a busy urban road, and the authorities have managed to turn the question of liability into a full bureaucratic relay race. My prediction: it will remain exactly as it is until something happens. At which point everyone will be appalled.
Then there is the €5 inactivity fee on Tallinja cards — charged to users who have not tapped in for a year. The Nationalist Party, under Alex Borg, is right to call this nonsense, even if opposition objections in Malta carry the same weight they always have, which is to say: enough to generate a headline, rarely enough to change anything. A fee for not using public transport, on an island where not using public transport is often the only rational choice, tells you everything about the relationship between the operator and the passenger. The passenger is not a customer. The passenger is a revenue line.
In St Paul's Bay, a bar owner was denied bail after a drug squad raid uncovered MDMA and cannabis on the premises. The story is unremarkable in its specifics; it is entirely remarkable in its frequency. The island's entertainment economy and its narcotics economy have always shared a postcode, and the authorities have never quite decided which one they are more comfortable regulating.
Ġorġ Mallia was buried this week in Qormi, in what Newsbook described as a colourful funeral. He was 68. He deserved more years and more columns than this digest can give him.
The question Valletta should be asking, as Bert's shuts its doors, is not where to eat instead — it is what kind of city it is choosing to become.
