Good, distinctly Maltese cuisine is hard to find but does exist. The food eaten draws its influences from Italy, northern Africa and Britain.
Most restaurants in resort areas like Sliema cater largely to English tourists, offering pub grub like meat and three veg or bangers and mash, and you have to go a little out of the way to find 'real' Maltese food. One of the island's specialities is rabbit (fenek), and small savoury pastries known as pastizzi are also ubiquitous.
The Maltese celebratory meal is fenkata, a feast of rabbit, marinated overnight in wine and bayleaf. The first course is usually noodles in rabbit sauce, followed by the rabbit meat stewed or fried (with or without gravy). Lookout for specialist fenkata restaurants.
One of the best is Tal Inglez in Mjarr. It's small, packed with Maltese, and you need to book. The standard is truely excellent, and a visit will give the chance to try other real maltese treats such as snails in gravy, horsemeat or quail.
True Maltese food is quite humble in nature, and rather fish and vegetable based -- the kind of food that would have been available to a poor farmer, fisherman or mason. Thus one would find staples like soppa ta' l-armla (widow's soup) which is basically a coarse mash of whatever vegetables are in season, cooked in a thick tomato stock.
Then there's arjoli which is a julienne of vegetables, spiced up and oiled, and to which are added butter beans, a puree made from broadbeans and herbs called bigilla, and whatever other delicacies are available, like Maltese sausage (a confection of spicy minced meat wrapped in stomach lining) or gbejniet (simple cheeselets made from goats' milk and rennet, served either fresh, dried or peppered). Maltese sausage is incredibly versatile and delicious. It can be eaten raw (the pork is salted despite appearances), dried or roasted.
A good plan is to try it as part of a maltese platter, increasingly available in tourist restaurants. Sun dried tomatoes and bigilla with water biscuits are also excellent.
Towards the end of summer one can have her or his fill of fried lampuki (dolphin fish) in tomato and caper sauce. One must also try to have a bite of hobz biz-zejt, which is leavened Maltese bread, cut into thick chunks, or else baked unleavened (ftira, from the Arabic root for flat), and served drenched in oil. The bread is then spread with a thick layer of strong tomato paste, and topped (or filled) with olives tuna, sun-dried tomatoes, capers, and the optional arjoli (which in its simpler form is called gardiniera).