Wonderful Moroccan, with a Tour of the Kitchen
I don't know why it is so frightening to order food in a restaurant if you have no idea what it is. I remember once in India, at a rather fancy palace-hotel restaurant, the menu listed "masala dosa" and "uthappam" and I got very nervous, thinking, I can't order masala dosa if I don't know what it is! (Of course, now I feel very foolish, having once not known what masala dosa is!) So I asked the waiter, "Excuse me, what is masala dosa?" He was surprised. "Well, that's a dosa, with masala."
There is something that makes one feel like a panicky idiot when the menu contains unfamiliar dishes. And yet, what could really go wrong? Odds are in your favor that it's not going to be a large plate of maggot-laced fishheads that arrives, and if it was, one might either sample it or send it back to the kitchen, saying, "These maggot-laced fishheads are ill-prepared."
Sometimes you think you've figured out a foreign cuisine pretty good, like, say, Chinese food, and then you go to a different country?maybe Belgium, where I was recently?and you think, Hey, I'll just go out for a Chinese meal, that's bound to be familiar. Only it turns out that the Chinese restaurants in Belgium have completely different ideas about Chinese cooking. That's how come I ended up with a large plate of very greasy boiled pork covered with thick greasy pork rind, even though the menu in English called the dish something like, "Twice cooked pork"; and another dish arrived that was a big bowl of gray soup with lumps. Or in China, where I ended up with a plate of deep-fried scorpions, because I thought the translation?listed under vegetables?was probably a crispy lacy sort of vegetable; and in another place the boiled intestines.
Yet although one feels somewhat stunted to peruse a mysterious menu of unknown or unknowable dishes, there is something also exhilarating about it. Recently I went with a friend to a Senegalese restaurant on 9th Ave. At least I thought it was a Senegalese place. I had long wanted to try one of the many West African places scattered throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, which had never been particularly upscale and always appeared to be kind of hole-in-the-wall stops for taxi drivers (there were even a few in the neighborhood in Antwerp where I was staying, but the double whammy, an African restaurant with a menu in Flemish, seemed totally overwhelming), and this restaurant did not seem quite as basic as so many others I've passed; there had been an attempt made here at decoration, with bright African textiles on the walls and, over a speaker system, some rather drearily inappropriate music by Boulez.
"Don't you have any Senegalese music?" I asked the waitress, who was also apparently the proprietress. She looked embarrassed. "The tape player isn't working." Her hair was tied up in a bandanna and she had the same sort of glow I had noticed on the men on the street whom I often saw selling counterfeit handbags, those men who look like royal panthers, tall and sleek, with soft, glowing eyes. You never see the equivalent women, though, and it's my understanding it's only the men who come over, and have to sleep 10 or 20 to a room, hoping to make a survival living. I could never understand why my single women friends didn't go after these guys, but anyway. I ate at this restaurant one time, and couldn't really get a grip on the food, which contained mysterious titles along the lines of masala dosa, only African. So I figured I'd go back. The only thing I remembered was there was a big cube of something called fufu, or fafa, sort of like pasty white polenta, but the proprietress wouldn't give me a copy of the menu and I lost the card.
So a few months later my friend Jeffrey Eugenides, the brilliant author of The Virgin Suicides, was in town from Berlin with his photographer wife Karen and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter for a literary festival, and I asked him if they could meet us at the African place, of which I couldn't remember the name. We had first met in Belgium and hung out together for two weeks for this Saint Amour festival, a literary/music production, and traveled around for several weeks, performing at different theaters and bonding. The experience was as close to being a rock 'n' roll performer as I'll ever know. So I was happy to be seeing him, and tried to give him directions to a place whose name I couldn't remember, that I believed possibly to be on 9th Ave. between 39th and 40th. It was. But when we got there the restaurant was closed; it was called Chez Gnagna Koty's. So maybe it wasn't even Senegalese and my illusions were shattered. We ended up going across the street to Tagine; there appeared to be people going into the place?and it was open?always a good sign for a restaurant.
I had never been to Morocco, although I always wanted to; for me the standard of Moroccan cuisine was Lotfi's. Jeffrey said we might as well have found a similar place on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, but I suggested he shut up and since he had been to Morocco, tell me how the food compared.
It was 7:30 on a Monday night and there was a belly dancer, performing noisily, an experience I wasn't entirely prepared for. She was a very attractive belly dancer named Miranda, but she had loud cymbals, and it was on the early side. I began to whine for a drink?there was a short wine list, organized by country, and Tim thought it would be in keeping to order a mysterious Moroccan wine, mysterious in that none of us knew about Moroccan wines, leading to that familiar "fear of the unknown food product." He selected the Domaine de Sahari '96, which proved to be highly drinkable and comparable, I guess, to a wine I would describe as slightly heavier than a Beaujolais.
After a while a man came out to pour us drinks and I asked him if he was the proprietor and he said, No, he was Hamid the Chef, so I pointed him out to my daughter, who was lying prostrate in the five-and-a-half-year-old position on the banquette next to me. "That man's the chef!" I said excitedly. Willow perked up. "She wants to be a pastry chef when she grows up," I told him. I didn't add that her other two career choices were cash register girl and plumber (we once had a rather thrilling bathroom disaster).
"Is that right?" said Hamid. She nodded, nobly. "Well, after you are finished eating, I will take you back to the kitchen and give you a tour," he said, "and you can see how I cook."
It was all delicious; I am particularly fond of the combination of meats with fruit, my lamb was soft with big prune plums and lovely crisp whole blanched almonds and they make their own harissa there, with fresh lemons, hot pepper, etc. To me there's nothing more exciting than the combination of sweet dried fruit and chewy meat and hot stuff. Tim had the pheasant, stuffed in phyllo pastry, redolent of cinnamon and full of those light, almost buttery almonds, Karen, the chicken tagine with preserved lemons, Jeffrey the couscous royale, which contained lamb and chicken, merguez, caramelized onions?really everything tasted good and Jeffrey said it tasted better than in Morocco. To me, the thing was, it was home cooking, peasant cooking, whatever you want to call it, which, I'm afraid, I would always prefer to something arranged on a plate covered with a court bouillon or reduction and which often approximates airline cuisine.
"You know," said Jeffrey, "I've been seeing a lot of people in town and they've told me lots about you and Tim."
"Yeah," I said, "like what? Who are these people?"
"People you don't know," he said. "They told me that you guys buy a lot of furniture and every few weeks when you get tired of it you throw it away, and people line up in your hallway to get the old furniture."
"True," I assured him. "Biedermeier, schmiedermeier. Aalto, rialto."
The children were given plates of beautiful cookies, made there, biscotti and jam and chocolate, dusted with confectioner's sugar and nuts, which I was obliged to surreptitiously steal, and we all went back to the kitchen. It was phenomenally clean; Hamid showed the kids how he took huge handfuls of fresh mint, shoved the leaves and stalks in a teapot, dumped green tea on top and then a half-bowl of sugar. Then he added boiling water. This made the children sneeze. It was fabulously delicious mint tea served in glasses. He invited us to come back for his cooking class, held intermittently, the next to be given on the Saturday after Father's Day. If Willow attended, Hamid said he would make sure to teach her how to make one kind of cake or cookie. It would be wonderful, I thought, if I could get her started on her career choice now, and possibly even to forgo first grade onward in order to go straight into her profession.
The next day I still couldn't understand how the bill had come to more than $200, since the kids had eaten bits of our food plus a generous complimentary helping of couscous and vegetables to shut them up, though once the belly dancer had died down, they were a lot calmer anyway. And I saw that on the take-away menu was printed a review of the place by Eric Asimov, who eats for The New York Times for $25 and under, a divine position. Then I realized that my husband had knowledgeably selected the "vintage" 1996 Moroccan wine, at 42 bucks a bottle, and that we had consumed two bottles. The wine did go with the meal beautifully, but would have tasted better for $24. And now, because we had spent $200 on a meal, probably for a time I would have to cease and desist tossing out the Knoll and Ruhlmann, the Eames, the Louis Quinze sofas and the gosh darn Federal secretaries, as had been my wont.