Café Italia

Excellent Italian in Adliya’s famed restaurant district Discuss this article

1

© ITP Images

 

• 
• Picture 1 of 2
• 

I recently got a new passport. It was a British passport, but it was not long before I realised that half of its contents were written in French. I don’t mind a bit of French now and again: on a menu, for example, or in a subtitled film. But it seemed rather strange to find it in a British passport. Why French? If we are talking about numbers, surely English and Mandarin would be more useful. Personally speaking, I would have favoured Spanish.

French is perhaps unique in the fact that in spite of the world around it, French will never change. In the Académie Française sits a team of 40 ‘immortals’ whose sole purpose in the world is to control the meaning of every word in the French language. Bon appétit, thanks to them, will never mean anything other than, enjoy your meal. The same in English, on the other hand, in the space of ten years (the lifetime of a passport) is likely to evolve to mean the complete opposite. Hence the fact that French is the diplomatic language of the world.

One can’t help thinking that the Italians might have benefitted from doing the same with food. Italian food is so ubiquitous across the globe one often wonders whether anyone knows what Italian food is anymore. The modern American-style pizza bears little resemblance to its Italian distant ancestor. And pasta dishes today are something that few nineteenth century Neapolitans would have encountered.

Cafe Italia, in Adliya’s famed restaurant district, is the place to head if you want to discover what real Italian food is. Gone are the carbohydrate-filled dishes devoid of taste and texture. The whole experience becomes something of an education: risotto doesn’t have to taste like porridge, pasta can have a delicate flavour, and calamari are not just rings of rubber.

My friend and I shared a couple of starters: seafood risotto and fried calamari. I have never been a huge fan of squid, owing to its rather dreadful texture. But squid didn’t catch on in the world because it felt like you were nibbling on a bike tyre, and the calamari in Cafe Italia were a revelation, tender, delicate and paired rather perfectly with a light salsa. The seafood risotto was another surprise, being both light in flavour and relatively crisp in terms of its texture.

For mains we ordered the whole wheat fusilli with tuna and the fettuccine with wagyu beef, the latter of which used fresh-made pasta. You can definitely tell the difference between fresh pasta and that which has been dried, however high grade the dried variety is, but it was the delicacy of the sauces that gave both dishes a lift: yet further evidence that tomato puree should be made illegal.

There are several good Italian restaurants in Bahrain, and you’d find it hard to tell them apart on price. On taste, however, Cafe Italia is the outright winner.

The bill (for two)
Seafood risotto BD6.700
Fried calamari BD5.700
Wheat fusilli with tuna BD7.000
Fettuccine with wagyu beef BD10.700
Water BD3.200
Total (inl tax/Service) BD38.595

• Previous reviews
  • 13 January,2009- reviewed by Time Out Bahrain staff

Time Out reviews restaurants anonymously and pays for meals. Of course, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or independence of user reviews.