Cocktails fit for a king at Palazzo de Verdelin

Gracy’s108-114 Archbishop Street,Valletta

Food: 6/10Service: 9+/10Ambience: 9/10Value: 6/10Overall: 7/10

Gracy’s is located in one of Valletta’s iconic buildings – the Hostel de Verdelin, a palace built for knight Jean-Jacques de Verdelin.

For those of you born in the 1970s, you may remember it hosting table tennis tournaments and providing a place for youngsters like myself to play table tennis.

A quick trawl through the interweb uncovered a far more colourful history. Built in the 1660s, it is a somewhat curious building fashioned more in the Spanish style than the French and Italian baroque architecture our capital city is renowned for.

Since then it has housed various families of notable repute and even more notable disrepute. It has been home to the Civil Service Club, the Valletta gendarmerie and briefly mentioned as one of the Valletta properties in the Gaffarena scandal in 2015. This was vehemently denied by the then minister Carmelo Abela. Then, in 2017, it was given a comprehensive treatment of botox and fillers and now boasts a fantastically beautiful façade.

But behind this majestic façade, the new owners, of which businessman Timmy Grech is one, have transformed...