About Mona

Mona is not a pseudonym. Mona is actually female, somewhere in her thirties, and human. In spite of popular misconception, she is not fat either. Thanks to a low-carb diet and much obsession with every beauty treatment available at the Transforma clinic, she's a healthy size 8. She so got into eating like this that she ended up writing Mona's Meals: The Foodbook, (Merlin Library, 2007) which was the bestselling book prior to Christmas 2007.  The paperback edition is still on sale in all major bookshops including Merlin Library and all Agenda outlets.

In spite of all the low-carb shebang, she'll eat anything once, except for the cockroach-like deep-fried insects at Chatuchak market in Bangkok. She has never been presented with bits of human flesh but wonders what she would do if she is.

Mona has worked in every aspect of restaurants from the floor, which she did happily and with more pride than is normally found in your average waitress, to the kitchen where she specialised in pastry. She has worked with everyone from bossy female head-waitresses who pinched clams off the customers' spaghetti before it was served, to commis chefs on methadone who couldn't even press the 'open' button on a microwave if it pinged open and hit them in the groin.

She has followed several courses at the ITS, including all those available in Food Preparation and Production and Pastry Techniques. They have basically served to make her aware of the low level of skill combined with the high level of bitchiness required to be a teacher, and the importance of knowing how to fry scotch eggs. Her favourite teacher was Effie. But then he's everybody's. In 2008 she went back to the ITS, this time to review it, and found that sadly, nothing had changed. If anything, it was worse than ever.

Her thesis on Food as Communication (available at the Melitensia section at the University of Malta) helped her discover many things: mainly how important it is to research, as well as the fact that food critics in New York have work within the same love-hate environment as she does in Malta: revered by the public, respected by good chefs, and bitched about by the bad chefs.

Her attendance at Gourmet Voice, the first international food mediatisers conference in Cannes, further confirmed this. But it didn't make her half as happy as meeting Joel Robuchon, Ferran Adria and Alice Waters under the same roof did. Lately she could be found having chats with Helene Darroze in her kitchen in Paris.  Helene's, not Mona's.

Incidentally, her favourite restaurant is not even local: it's in Paris, and it is called L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon.  Mona is now on first name terms with its Manager Philippe, and regularly calls him up to slot in people on her behalf (the restaurant has a six-week waiting list).

She has been writing the Mona's Meals column for The Sunday Times and consequently Malta Today since 2001. Prior to that, she produced a very popular travel television show for PBS. A hard slog which looked very glamorous but wasn't. It was fun though, which is why she still does the travel writing, with no camera chasing her. Mona writes for several glossies, including FM, where she happily supplies information about her best-loved hotels all over the world, in a series called Cool Rooms.  

2005 saw the birth of www.planetmona.com.  Starting out quietly, the site merely reflected her writings in various newspapers and glossy magazines. Then, somewhere around 2007, the website took on a life of its own, becoming Malta's truly liberal voice where anything concerning food, eating, travel and even beauty is concerned. The site saw a 300% increase in hits at the end of 2007 and today has upwards of 4000 hits a day; that, for those not in the industry, is a lot more than some Sunday papers sell in a week.  

Readers write in with all kinds of questions: from asking for advice on how to prepare a children's party to queries about how to lose weight while on holiday.  Mona also organises regular Mona's Meals Cookery Workshops with Claude Camilleri of Palazzo Santa Rosa and various farmers, fishermen and chefs where she gets to address most of these questions.

in 2008, Mona started the 'Mona's Meals Eat Well Campaign' where she scouts for and finds good meat, good fish, good cheese and anything that has not been processed and industrialised to high heaven. She continues to fight, quietly but relentlessly, for less use of pesticides, fish-farming, and the industrialised approach to animal husbandry.

On an island where, if you can pay, sometimes greasing a few palms along the way, your restaurant or travel destination will be praised to high heaven, Mona battles on, seemingly alone but with the strength of her thousands of Funs behind her. And she does this with her unique take on the things that move her.  'The Funs of Mona's Meals' group on Facebookhttp://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4680648896 is one of Malta's largest Facebook groups.

It's journalistic democracy, but certainly not as we once knew it.