Beyond The Menu

Restaurants have long understood that dinner is rarely just about dinner. The view matters, as does the vibe, not to mention the prospect of something interesting happening between the first drink and the final course.

At the Valletta Waterfront, that something now involves an alchemist, a pirate queen and an entire cast of characters that adds drama to the evening menu.

Every Tuesday the dining destination now becomes an open-air stage for Cagliostro & the Pirate Queen – The Secret Story of Malta. The free, 20-minute production unfolds against a backdrop of 18th-century warehouses and majestic Grand Harbour, giving visitors a compact cultural experience added to an evening of food and drink.

The production is presented in collaboration with Valletta Cruise Port and the restaurants along the Waterfront, bringing together culture, hospitality and performance to create a distinctive theatrical experience that enhances the character and appeal of the destination.

Of course, the idea of combining performance and dining is one that has been tested to great success internationally. In London, Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience turns a three-course meal into an interactive comedy, with performers serving and disrupting dinner in roughly equal measure. In the United States, Teatro ZinZanni has combined dining with circus, cabaret and theatre since the late 1990s. Medieval banquets, murder-mystery evenings and immersive dining productions have also become familiar attractions in cities around the world.

The proposition behind them is simple: the customer is buying into an evening’s worth of entertainment, rather than a meal alone. Valletta Waterfront offers a more accessible variation on this model. The performance is not part of any set menu and is not tied to one restaurant. It’s not even ticketed, and visitors remain free to choose where (and whether) to eat.

The restaurants all collectively benefit from the atmosphere, footfall and longer dwell time the production can generate. Now, we’ve all had to sit through history lessons at school. Let’s just say that the experience is not necessarily always entertaining. Happily, the show itself does not attempt to deliver a history lesson. Instead, it borrows freely from Malta’s past, bringing together knights, corsairs, alchemists and seafarers in a story that delivers adventure and humour by the shipful.

At its centre the narrative is the eponymous Count Alessandro Cagliostro, an enigmatic 18th-century adventurer whose association with Malta still invites speculation. His sidekick is the fictional Pirate Queen, created to embody the defiance and bravado of the Mediterranean’s corsair age. The duo leads audiences into a version of Maltese history in which fact and folklore are allowed to mingle and to entertain.

The production’s running time is 20 minutes, well-suited to the ambience of a hospitality destination. It’s easy enough to catch the show before dinner, or while having a drink, and then stay on at one of the restaurants for a snack or a full meal.

All this doesn’t change the fact that good food and service are needed to bring people to a restaurant, but what happens around the meal can be just as memorable. A live performance gives visitors a reason to arrive early or linger afterwards, particularly when it belongs naturally in the setting. This is clearly very much the case at Valletta Waterfront, where Cagliostro borrows its atmosphere from the old warehouses, the harbour and the area’s maritime past.

Once the characters withdraw, the promenade returns to the familiar business of cocktails, conversation and dinner. But, for 20 minutes each Tuesday, Valletta Waterfront offers its diners something that does not appear on any menu: a little theatre with their evening out.


For more information and schedules visit www.vallettawaterfront.com/thestoryofmalta