Tag Archives: Casablanca

Casablanca — the fish market

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Casablanca’s great central food market lies off the lovely Muhammed V Street. And at its very center is a fish market, with dozens of stalls selling this morning’s catch, fresh from the sea.

They were still setting up the morning we arrived. A recently cut swordfish head stood by the entry. Other fish also awaited their artful placement in the vendors’ displays.

 

And I do mean “artful placement.” The stalls that had finished setting up were beautiful.

   

Dan looked at me wistfully and said, “This fish market alone is almost enough to make me want to live in Casablanca.”

 

 

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?