Food guide
Eating Malta: Pastizzi, Fenkata & Ġbejniet
Malta's Mediterranean setting suggests Italian food, and plenty of that is genuinely on offer — but the island's own dishes tell a different, more specific story: a savoury pastry eaten at any hour, a rabbit stew with a history of quiet defiance behind it, and a small fresh cheese that's Gozo's own.
Updated 2026-08-16
Pastizzi: The Snack That's Always Available
Pastizzi are Malta's signature savoury pastry — flaky, diamond-shaped parcels filled with either ricotta or a mushy split-pea mixture, sold hot from pastizzeriji (dedicated pastry shops) that in Malta's busier towns often stay open around the clock. They're eaten as breakfast, a mid-morning snack, a late-night stop after a night out, or all three in the same day — genuinely part of daily life rather than a tourist specialty, and cheap enough that trying both fillings costs almost nothing. Valletta, Sliema and the older town centres all have long-established pastizzeriji worth seeking out over any tourist-strip imitation.
Fenkata: Rabbit as the National Dish
Rabbit — fenkata — is as close as Malta gets to a genuine national dish, traditionally stewed slowly in wine, garlic and herbs, or fried and finished with the same sauce over pasta as a starter. The tradition carries real history: during the rule of the Knights Hospitaller, rabbit hunting rights on the island were restricted to the nobility, and eating rabbit became, for ordinary Maltese, a quiet act of defiance against that restriction — an association the dish still carries culturally, long after the restriction itself disappeared. A proper fenkata is a genuine sit-down meal, traditionally shared, and village restaurants inland from the resort coast tend to do it better than anywhere on the tourist strip.
Ġbejniet: Gozo's Fresh Cheese
Ġbejniet are small, round cheeselets made from sheep's or goat's milk, a speciality most closely associated with Gozo but found across both islands — served fresh and soft, dried and firm, or peppered and left to mature into a much sharper, harder cheese. Fresh ġbejniet turn up as a starter or salad ingredient in restaurants across Malta and Gozo, while the dried, peppered version is a genuine local staple worth seeking out at a village market or farm shop rather than a supermarket shelf.