Last Updated on August 20, 2023
If you are looking for places to eat in St Julian’s in Malta, here are 5 unique restaurants that are worth checking out! When researching places to eat, I did find that a lot of restaurants in St Julian’s are on the expensive side. I generally don’t tend to eat in high end restaurants, so I tried to find some unique places that were a bit more budget friendly!
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Restaurants in St Julians Malta
Blue Elephant
⭐️Thai restaurant with indoor waterfall
I did make one exception to the budget and that was visiting the Blue Elephant Thai restaurant located within the Hilton Malta. Honestly, I still dream about the meal I ate there. The Blue Elephant chain has 2 locations in Thailand and just 1 elsewhere in the world!
What makes this restaurant unique is that it has a waterfall and stream that runs through the restaurant. The stream is filled with koi carp fish and you have to cross a little wooden bridge to get to various seating areas.
The staff are amazing. When you arrive you are given a bowl of prawn crackers, the best prawn crackers I have ever eaten! Because the menu is expensive, we decided to pick a couple of different dishes from the starters, mains and dessert menu and share them ‘tapas’ style. This worked absolutely fine, the way the dishes are presented makes this very easy to do anyway.
We shared: Spring Rolls ‘Blue Elephant’, Golden Chicken, steamed rice, Burnt Banana Custard Cream, Passion Fruit Cake and 2 coffees. I had a Thai Iced Coffee and just like the crackers, I still crave it! It’s consisted a dessert coffee as it’s made with both condensed and evaporated milk, but it’s the best iced coffee I’ve ever had!
The portion size is also pretty big and we did struggle to eat dessert on top of everything else we had ordered. Without the desserts, our bill would have obviously been a lot less!
Shoreditch Bar & Kitchen
⭐️Great for dessert
We visited Shoreditch Bar & Kitchen after our Malta day tour, so we had already eaten a ‘dinner’ type lunch that day. So we decided to skip a ‘second’ dinner and ended up just eating dessert from Shoreditch Bar & Kitchen.
The have an awesome pancake menu and the portions are GIANT. It ended up being a bit like ‘Man vs Food’, I struggled to finish mine but I was determined not to be beaten. My mum on the other hand failed miserably!
We both had iced coffees and I had Kinder Egg Pancakes. It came with 3 pancakes that were COVERED in white and milk chocolate sauce, biscuit crumb and a whole Kinder Egg on the top! My mum had the Flake Pancakes. At the time of my visit, they cost €7 each.
If you don’t want to pig out on pancakes, they also have a burger and hot dog menu as well as a breakfast and lunch menu.
Forty Fishes
⭐️Budget friendly seafood
Malta has A LOT of seafood restaurants (check out this post about Marsaxlokk fishing village and market) but seafood can be on the expensive side! However, a more budget friendly alternative is Forty Fishes. They are more like a takeaway restaurant but they have a couple of tables to sit inside.
Forty Fishes serve a range of fresh seafood, that you can see in the ice counter. We opted for Fish’n’Chips, which similar to the British version, is in a homemade batter. It usually comes with chips but we decided to upgrade to the roasted potatoes. It tasted amazing and the fish was so fresh.
Highly recommend if you are looking for a budget friendly seafood restaurant in St Julians. Many of the seafood restaurants around the Spinola Bay area are waterfront, so you essentially pay a premium for the view. Forty Fishes is just in a side street, but you can not fault the food at all.
The Crafty Cat Pub
⭐️Fun theme with craft beer & good food
Another unique place to eat in St Julian’s is The Craft Cat Pub! It’s is Alice In Wonderland themed, so has a chess board and pieces on the ceiling, giant playing cards and trailing plants over the walls. The ‘craft’ part of its name is a nod to the craft beers and ciders that they have on tap and in bottles!
They mostly serve typical pub food, chicken wings and burgers. My mum had Bangers & Mash and said it was one of the best sausage and mash she’s ever had…and she’s had A LOT. I had the Grilled Chicken Burger (with salad, avocado, chicken and bacon) with fries and that was really good too. You can also ‘build your own’ burger if you didn’t want to choose one of the ones on the menu.
The pub along the promenade from St Julian’s to Sliema, closer to Balluta Bay. It’s on an upper floor and has a few tables that face the water overlooking the bay, so this is a great place to people watch and see the world go by! It’s also quite a budget friendly option compared to some of the other waterfront restaurants in St Julian’s.
The Crafty Cat Pub also have entertainment such as: comedians, live music, trivia nights and Karaoke. Other than the trivia night, most start after 10pm.
The Dubliner
⭐️Budget friendly food & good music
Another budget friendly place to eat in St Julians is The Dubliner in Spinola Bay. They have a small outside seating area along with two levels of indoor seating. Yes, it’s not very ‘Maltese’, it’s a typical Irish pub, but you can not fault the food or the price! And bonus, they were playing good music too!
The serve pub classics, burgers and sandwiches and salads. I had Oriental Vegetarian Noodles (there are also many Asian restaurants in St Julian’s to pick from!) and my mum had the Irish Pride beef stew, that was really good (it would have been rude not to have sampled it too!).
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