Marrakesh

A nice trip to North Africa in what may be New England's first Little Morocco

by Robert Nadeau

561 Cambridge Street (East Cambridge); 497-1614
Open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
No liquor
MC, Visa
Up one step from sidewalk level

The claim on the menu is that this is "the only authentic Moroccan restaurant in Massachusetts." Since my knowledge of Moroccan cooking is derived from cookbooks and one visit to the Moroccan restaurant at Walt Disney's Epcot Center, Marrakesh could be authentic, a good copy, or an utter travesty, so far as I would know. But I can tell you reliably that some dishes at Marrakesh are very, very good, whether they are authentic or not, and that some are rather bland.

The room, which looks like a converted bar, is small, but the feeling is warm. A considerable variety of (probably) authentic music, from full brass bands down to solo strings and drums, adds greatly to the ambiance, as do pottery tagines (conical dishes) that must be authentic, since they look exactly like the pictures in Paula Wolfert's book Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco.

Wolfert fans and culinary newcomers alike will approve of the chicken bastilla appetizer ($6.95). This is the classic Moroccan showoff dish, sometimes made with squab, that comes to the table as a decorated flat, hot pie filled with an exquisite and rather sweet mixture of chicken, egg sauce, ground almonds, cinnamon, and sugar. Wolfert says it is eaten with the thumb and two fingers of the right hand, and implies that licking one's burned fingers is part of the experience. The restaurant, helpfully, provides knives and forks, and I think the bastilla is just as good without pain -- a filling, sweet-and-savory dish that is both completely exotic and easy to like. It could be even more magical with finer pastry, but still, Marrakesh's version is not to be missed. There is also a seafood bastilla ($7.95) and a vegetable bastilla ($5.95). The latter is filled with green peas, raisins, and rice, and is perhaps a little too sweet.

Other starters include two soups and several salads. Of the soups, I preferred the shourba ($3.50; $2.50 at lunch), a clear, tart, spicy vegetable soup with a bright-yellow broth. Harira ($3.50; $2.50 at lunch) is the better-known spicy tomato soup that some Muslims use each evening to break the fast of Ramadan. Though I was only normally hungry, I found it deliciously herbal, hearty with lentils, chickpeas, and noodles.

The "Moroccan appetizer" ($6.50) includes four salads between "spokes" of preserved lemon peel. Zaalook is this cuisine's version of mashed eggplant , enriched with tomato and serious pepper. Charmola, which is also sometimes a sauce, is a kind of cooked salsa with tomato, zucchini, a lot of cumin, and a little cilantro. A potato salad has a clear and sour marinade and a lot of parsley, and a carrot salad is made from cooked carrots with herbs. Shlada bidawita ($3.50) is a simple salad of tomatoes with cumin, again with four slices of preserved lemon peel.

My favorite main dishes were the most complicated: lamb mashmash ($13.95) and Tagine Souiri ($14.95; 6.95 at lunch). The latter, our waiter explained, is a specialty of a particular seaside village, and one of the few fish tagines in the Moroccan repertoire. (A tagine is the classic Moroccan stew, slow-cooked in the flat-bottomed, conical-lidded dish of the same name.) It's a marvelous entrée, made with a swordfish steak in a lively sauce of green olives and herbs, with herbal fried potatoes. This sauce could be adapted to any fish from haddock to bluefish; here, the dense meatiness of swordfish works well. The lamb mashmash is a well-done stew of lamb marinated in honey, and finished in a tart sauce with raisins, apricots, and a strong sprinkling of sesame.

Moroccan chicken ($12.95) is also fairly lively, a half-chicken in a sauce yellow with turmeric and saffron, tart with olives and preserved lemon, and again slightly sweet. "Couscous tfaya" ($12.95), a considerable mound of couscous on a quarter-chicken, has a sweeter sauce of golden onions, chickpeas, raisins, and a lot of cinnamon.

There's always something appealing about couscous, the tiny steamed pasta smaller than the grains of millet for which it is named, but at Marrakesh the issue is complicated by the blandness of many of the couscous dishes. The "Prince couscous" ($11.95; $7.95 at lunch), for example, is a broiled chicken breast with steamed winter squash, zucchini, carrot, rutabaga, and white potato, all on vast heaps of delicate couscous without sauce. One possible strategy at lunch is to order both a tagine and a couscous, and eat the one on the other.

But beware of the vegetable tagine ($12.95) which is another plate of steamed plain vegetables, such as peas, green beans, carrot, white potato, rutabaga, and acorn squash. One yearns for a sauce -- perhaps harissa, the deadly Moroccan hot sauce. At dinner, some dishes (such as the Moroccan chicken) are served with a side of couscous, which does the job. You might also consider the elaborate diafa dinners ($19.95 to $25.95 per person) which are the restaurant's idea of appropriate banquets for a group.

With such sweet food, the Moroccan idea of dessert is more like tea snacks -- slightly salty pastries designed to be eaten with very sweet Moroccan mint tea. A pastry plate ($3.95) might feature "gazelle horns" stuffed with cinnamon rice or ground almonds flavored with lemon and rosewater; a crescent of something we might call a sesame "peanut sandy"; a saltier, plumper sesame cake; sliced butter cookies; an almond biscotto or two. When the machine works, there is espresso ($2). I didn't see spiced Moroccan coffee on the menu, but maybe soon.

Marrakesh is on a relatively quiet block of East Cambridge, west of the courthouse but east of the Portuguese neighborhood. It's not far from a live-poultry butcher, and it's across the street from a Moroccan bookstore (both French and Arabic), which probably makes this New England's first Little Morocco. For the sake of lively, exotic dining out, let's hope it's not the last.

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It's almost impolite to mention it, but the present restaurant boom, like the last one, will end someday. The previous crash, in the late '80s, ushered in a period of mandatory Northern Italian menus, sequels to established restaurants, and small immigrant-run cafés. If the restaurant gods are just, the next shakeout will favor those who abandon wild experiments for a small core of specialties done uniquely well. A more reasonable prediction: because members of the new culinary establishment are generally friendly toward one another, the more businesslike among them will find themselves sustaining the talented spendthrifts, with (eventually) attendant public friction.