Category Archives: Morocco

Morocco, the food

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Moroccan food is amazingly delicious. Period, end of statement. I don’t think we had one thing we didn’t like. And it’s beautifully served, too.

Our first night in Casablanca, which was also our first night in Morocco, we wandered the streets of the new medina after dark looking for something that might have the feel of someplace Moroccan that is yet also unpretentious and comfortable. We eliminated the idea of eating at the hotel from a menu whose prices might make some American restauranteurs gasp. Other restaurants seemed too tourist-oriented; nix on the Cafe de France right across the street from the hotel. The first floors of the street cafes and eateries were inhabited exclusively by (mostly cigarette-smoking) Moroccan men. Nix on the comfortable criterion. What we found, by chance, was Le Riad Restaurant on Mohamed El Quorri Street. It was upstairs from one of the seemingly all-male cafes. The decor was Moroccan-style and looked authentic. And it was beautiful.

  

And the menu was as attractive as the decor. We ordered a tagine of chicken with preserved lemon from the fixed-price menu. It came with a Moroccan salad of diced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and onions with cumin and lemon juice. We also ordered a harira soup and a vegetarian couscous. This didn’t seem like much–a first course and a main dish for each of two people–and we were hungry. The food was wonderful, but we couldn’t finish it. In truth, we couldn’t finish half of it.

Dan and I were brought up to clean our plates. We don’t like to leave food uneaten that will probably have to be thrown out. It feels selfish and wasteful. At a certain level, the rest of our trip in Morocco might be looked at as a quest to figure out how to order the right amount of food.

The darned thing was, we couldn’t finish a meal even when we ordered only one meal for the two of us. It didn’t help that several Moroccan people assured us that they eat these quantities regularly. It also didn’t help that the food was invariably breathtakingly, staggeringly good.

And so, perhaps it was only appropriate that our last night in Casablanca, which was also our last night in Morocco, we returned, wiser now, to Le Riad Restaurant. We ordered one meal from the a la carte menu:

    1. a bowl of harira (7 dhs)
    2. a Moroccan salad (10 dhs)
    3. a small chicken-and-olive tagine (25 dhs)

I emphasize that it was a small tagine because a large tagine was also offered for just 10 dirhams more. With about 8.2 dirhams to the dollar, this meal cost about $5 for the two of us, plus tax and tip.

And we couldn’t finish it.

Casablanca, looking over the old medina

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We booked a luxury hotel in Casablanca (the Hyatt Regency) for our first night, using Dan’s accumulated points. Our excuse for this indulgence, besides for the fact that it was “free,” was that we were bound to be exhausted from our flights and wanted to immerse ourselves more slowly into Moroccan culture. We were given a room on the sixth floor looking out across the old medina toward the Atlantic Ocean, which could barely be made out through the haze. The view took in the famous Hassan II mosque as well as the working port.

 

Now maybe, like me, you’re focused on the main attractions–the mosque and the port–but maybe, like Dan, you’ve noticed something odd about the rooftops of the old city.

Have you ever seen such an array of satellite dishes? How are all these people in this (presumably) poor section of town getting the money for satellite dishes? Many days later we learned that there are organizations who will give satellite dishes to those too poor to buy one for themselves. As for a TV, however, the people are on their own. How many, we wonder, have them? Is that what our juvenile “guides” are saving their tips toward?

Morocco photographs

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I have been sorting through the photographs from Dan’s and my trip to Morocco last month. There are about a thousand of them, so this is big job. Now that “film” has gotten so cheap, we take so many pictures. Since it now seems evident that it will be some time before I can publish this whole trip, I thought I’d get started with a random favorite photo here or there from out of the pile.

These goats seemed happily ensconced in this argan tree. Argan trees grow only in Morocco. They produce nuts from which people make an oil that allegedly has healthful properties and seems to work well on dry skin. It is nearly as impossible to escape Morocco without a argan-oil product as it is to escape without a rug.

After we stopped and I took this photo, the shepherd–an old man with astonishingly bad teeth–appeared seemingly from nowhere and demanded ten dirhams (about $1.20). I didn’t mind paying him. The absence of goats in other nearby argan trees strongly suggested that the shepherd had put these goats there somehow. But ten dirhams seemed excessive in a country given to exaggerated bargaining. I gave him the two dirhams that were in my pocket, and he seemed well pleased. I probably overpaid.