The Boston Phoenix
July 8 - 15, 1999

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Café Baraka

Cambridgeport's flirtation with the Barbary Coast

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT
Café Baraka
(617) 868-3951
801/2 Pearl Street (Cambridgeport), Cambridge
Open for lunch Tues-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; and for dinner Tues-Sun, 5:30-10:30 p.m. Closed Monday.
Cash only
No liquor
Narrow spaces; up a half-step from sidewalk level
No smoking
I'm one of those people for whom eating out is a quest. The holy grail is the perfect neighborhood restaurant, a little storefront that not only prepares a totally new kind of food, but prepares it really well, and for cheap.

I thought for a moment Café Baraka might be that restaurant. It's not -- I mean, nothing is; the essence of the grail is that it can never be found -- but it's certainly the kind of place that makes the quest worthwhile. In a little blue-trimmed storefront on Pearl Street, way outside Central Square, one chef and one waiter deliver a remarkable set of North African appetizers and some pretty good entrées. Plus, you can bring your own wine.

North African food -- or, more precisely, Maghreb food, from the fertile strip of continent along the western Mediterranean -- is one of the world's great crossroads cuisines. The region's indigenous people are Berbers; the Romans used the region to grow wheat. Since then, a substrate of Berber traditions has Cafe Baraka been overlaid by successive invasions of Arabs, Turks, exiled Jews from Spain, and French colonists. The result feels like Middle Eastern food run through a spice cabinet, or through an orchard. Baraka's is not the only North African menu in the city, but I've never had anything quite like its cinnamon hummus, which you scoop up with warm pita bread.

This is a small restaurant, with only about 20 seats around thick wood-surfaced tables. It's not cramped, but there's so little spare room that the plates and glasses are stacked on a shelf near the entrance, and the soda fridge delimits the foyer. (The place feels more obscure and random than it really is; the co-owner, Alia Rajeb, is the sister of well-known Boston chef Moncef Meddeb.) Food comes out of the kitchen through an open brick arch that, maybe intentionally and maybe not, resembles the thick-walled whitewashed architecture of the Maghreb. The brick wall has a poster of the "Doors of Tunis." A plant hangs in the window. Two ceiling fans spin vainly. The lemonade is scented with rose water.

The essential dish here is something called the Ultimate Vegetable Platter ($9.50), which is basically a collection of dips arranged on a big plate, served with fluffy wedges of fresh-baked pita. Aside from the cinnamon hummus, there's a salty tapénade of carrot and green-olive chunks; a cold lentil-and-scallion salad; and a garlicky purée of roasted eggplant and red pepper, with pepper slices so long you can curl them around your fork like noodles. Across the top of the plate is a dollop of labneh, the soft white tangy Middle Eastern cheese, and a spray of watercress. Everything is familiar but somehow invigorated, like seeing the world through yellow sunglasses.

Then there is the less familiar. I had never before seen the chickpea custard ($3.50), here a kind of warm square pudding with a slightly nutty taste and a soft pie crust underneath. It was served with a dollop of harissa, the bitter and spicy North African red-pepper sauce. If you order zaatar ($3.50), a word that elsewhere refers to a spice mix sprinkled on flatbread, you'll get a pita dusted with spices and covered with soft caramelized onion. The thing more conventionally known as zaatar is served at the beginning of every meal: wedges of cracker-like flatbread dusted with sesame and thyme.

The appetizers were, by and large, more electrifying than the dinners. The entrées operate on the complete-meal model: a starch topped with vegetables and meat. Couscous is supposedly the national dish of every country in North Africa, but we tried four dishes and got four different starches. The "brochette" ($11.95) was three kinds of meat on long metal skewers laid over a bed of skin-on French fries. A lot of these dishes vary from night to night, depending on what meat is in stock. Our skewers had chicken chunks, seared lamb liver, and a narrow link of merguez sausage, skewered lengthwise. It was denser, plainer, and more organ-y than the usual merguez, which is spicy.

Cafe Baraka Not hard to guess what the carbohydrate was in Couscous Royale ($14.95); this dish had fat shrimps and mixed vegetables (carrots, squash, peppers, eggplant) over moistened couscous, all topped with skewered chicken and merguez. A dish called "rechta" ($14.95) consisted of thin flat noodles floating in a remarkable broth fragrant with star anise and saffron, topped with shrimp, salmon chunks, and slightly smallish and dubious mussels. And the grain was rice on another dish, a leg of lamb special ($13.95) in which the rice is tossed, Moroccan-style, with plump sweet raisins.

Dessert (all $5.50) took us by surprise. Our waiter, a shambling handsome guy, described one choice offhandedly: "baklava, with a kind of hazelnut cookie and, um . . . another cookie." What actually arrived was a stylish square plate with an elegant lozenge of baklava -- denser and less flaky than the familiar Greek kind -- with an oval hazelnut tart and almond frangipane. They came in a pool of rose water, with a spray of tiny rosebuds for décor. Another dessert, crème brûlée, is caramelized by the waiter with a little blowtorch in the back of the dining room (if you sit at the back table, you can watch him do it). What we got was dense for crème brûlée and slightly gooey, with apricot and date chunks inside. Across the top was laid an excellent cookie, kind of a flat macaroon.

My one regret about Baraka was that I couldn't manage to call early enough to order the bastille, the famous many-layered Moroccan pigeon pie. It requires 24 hours' notice; there's lots of marinating involved, and who keeps pigeon around the kitchen these days?

Baraka's bring-your-own policy means a little forethought can yield some nice cash savings. This is especially true if your friend does the bringing. My friend John, who had told me about the restaurant in the first place, showed up with a nice German riesling, which he hated, so I mostly finished it off. The rose-water lemonade ($1.75) is an excellent and rather unusual stand-in if you forget wine; Coke comes directly out of the 20-ounce plastic bottle.

Baraka suffers from many of the little things that can plague a tiny restaurant. The service is brisk and cheery, but with only one waiter things can spiral into serious delays if everyone, for instance, tries to pay at once. During downtime the chef pops out and jokes with the patrons. It makes sense to call ahead and check on space, because when there's no room inside you may end up waiting with your bag of wine outside on Pearl Street. Then again, depending on the night, you might be more comfortable there. Summertime climate control at Baraka consists of two ceiling fans and an open door. My girlfriend remained dewy-fresh through dinner, while I perspired over my pita. Somehow, though, I just felt that much closer to Tunisia.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.


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