Food notes from Morocco

Day 1

Grateful for dinner at the riad after having arrived late to airport chaos and torrential rain. It’s a different Christmas Eve to what we’re used to. Harira (Moroccan soup) and then fish tagine and couscous with vegetables and goat.

We’re given a little bowl of dates when our harira arrives. We’re not told what to do with them, so we just eat them. They’re taken away when our soup bowls are cleared. I subsequently learn that you eat harira with dates. The dates taste like caramel. They’re some of the nicest I’ve ever eaten.

We drink vodka with soda on ice after dinner in our room. It’s my most sober Christmas Eve since childhood.

Day 2

After a splish splash in the hammam and a morning at the spa, we chance upon a little restaurant that has a blackboard menu advertising rabbit tagine, kofte and egg tagine and chicken tagine. In spite of the restaurant being called “Restaurant Pizzeria”, that blackboard is enough to lure us in.

Our attempt at eating lunch al fresco is thwarted, and we’re moved inside the restaurant, which is a tiny space, not larger than a Western household’s toilet, with only two tables. The young waitress who seems to permanently bounce with energy turns on the lights - a few strips of neon green lighting that light up the restaurant’s walls, which are lined with printed cloth. Upstairs, another woman is busy preparing our rabbit and kofte tagines.

The young waitress bounds down the stairs with a basket of bread and a little glass of Moroccan olive oil that is infused with za’atar. She starts asking us questions about where we’re from and what we’re doing here. She tells me I have a baby face and chubby cheeks. I find out her name is Laila. The woman cooking upstairs is also called Layla. Laila heads out to the street to take a phone call.

The bread is soft and pillowy. It is, and will continue to be, the best bread we’ve eaten so far. We dribble little spoonfuls of oil on small lumps of torn bread.

Layla yells out to Laila on the street below: our food is ready to be delivered to us. Laila bounds in, bounds up the stairs, and bounds back down again with our first tagine. Layla follows with the second. Laila puts music on for us - loud Moroccan music that plays through a pair of computer speakers that are connected up to and sitting on top of an old stereo, not dissimilar to the one I was given for my 13th birthday. Laila goes back out to the street and takes another phone call. The music is so thuddy that the computer speakers crash to the ground.

The tagines are delicious, though I will later learn that the rabbit tagine primarily consisted of a rabbit head, that, unbeknown to me, I was picking away at. Phil had clocked that I didn’t realise I was picking meat from a rabbit head, coming very close to its eye, and decided not to tell me. He told me three days later while we were sipping cups of coffee at the beach bar in Essaouira.

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Dinner at a restaurant run exclusively by women. Beautiful. Our main of chicken cooked underneath crepes in an almond and saffron sauce was beautiful and enough for Christmas dinner for a whole family.

Day 3

On our way back to our riad from the Jardin Majorelle, we stop at a little street side stall where a lovely woman is selling lots of different handmade biscuits. We fill up a little plastic tub of the ones we like the look of. She throws two extras in for free.

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We eat dinner at a small, family-run restaurant in the souks, not far from our riad. The place serves one dish - couscous with chicken and vegetables; well, two dishes if you choose to have your couscous without chicken.

The restaurant is tiny, room to seat about ten. Just as we arrived, a French family of 20 had arrived for dinner. Somehow the owners found room for them; stools kept appearing from out of nowhere and tables were pushed together. It reminded us of my aunty Nik and her family of 17 brothers and sisters.

Eventually we got a table and our dinner. Our couscous, chicken and vegetables were served on a big, round platter. We ate from the platter. It was simple but delicious.

The owners’ daughter, who was dressed to the nines in an otherwise very understated space, constantly topped up our mint tea and gave us an extra plastic bottle of water each, on the house, because we’d had to wait for the big French family to be served.

Once we finished our couscous, the stylish one brought round a cardboard box of biscuits, picked up from a nearby bakery, and we were allowed to help ourselves to one.

Day 4

We go back to the little biscuit shop to buy another tub of biscuits for our car trip to Essaouira. We get four free biscuits today.

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Our driver makes a stop at the Carrefour Market on the outskirts of Essaouira so we can buy ice. The supermarket was teeming with French and Spanish people. Well, not the supermarket, but the “Cave” to the right of the main shopping area, which sold booze. There were plenty of locals too, mostly men, who seemed to have a thing for cheap bottles of rosé and brandy. As well as buying ice I bought a bottle of Moroccan white wine and a couple of bottles of tonic.

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We eat dinner at a little restaurant just down the road from our riad, after sipping on mojitos at one of the bars in town that serves drinks to people who just want a drink and not dinner. A novelty! The mojitos came with long plastic orange and pink straws that were contorted and twisted together, a bit like those long balloons that clowns shape into dogs. Anyway, our dinner began with complimentary plates of delicious homemade olive tapenade with crostini and and even more delicious homemade marinated white anchovies. I had a really good chicken tagine.

Day 5

We went to a small restaurant for lunch that was quite funny. We sat on a small, raised platform with two other families, all of us sitting round tables that were shaped in a U. The tables were tiny, the kind you might find in a primary school classroom, and were all painted bright purple and orange and blue. Our food took close to an hour to arrive. We were very confused about what was going on. Everyone was. The sardine ball tagine that we (finally) ate was exceptional, one of our best dishes of the trip, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to go back for more.

We found a beachside bar where they sold coffee and mint tea and glasses of white wine. The wine pours were bowling club ones. The waiters (all men) wore black waistcoats. One wore a BMW cap.

Day 6

The weather was better so we went to the local fish market. We chose fish - two red snapper and squid - from one of five stalls and were led into a cavernous dining hall space that had several small kitchens and associated makeshift restaurants set up around its perimeter. A mum’s two sons took our order while she prepared our lunch for us.

We were presented with little heart-shaped plastic bowls of harissa and olives and a basket of bread. Then came small bowls of French fries, one each, and another bowl of Moroccan chopped salad. Our snapper was grilled under charcoal, and the squid was fried in a pot of hot oil on a gas burner that was connected to a cylinder. We wiped our sticky hands on pieces of newsprint. It was a beautiful lunch.

Coffee then sparkling water then white wine at the beach bar. I am reading Annie Ernaux’s The Years. I have just finished Flora Feltham’s Bad Archive.

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We try a new restaurant for dinner, one we’ve been told is good. Phil growls at me for having tried to ask the French speaking waiter whether the fish in the fish tagine would be fresh. He insists it would be fresh. I tell him he mustn’t have overheard the waiter at last night’s restaurant telling a customer that unfortunately the fish had to come from the freezer because of the bad weather.

Day 7

I am awake early, so I decide to go in search of the street side donut seller that I have read about. And I decide I will pop into Essaouira’s illicit liquor store - another thing that I have read about. At 9am, both are shut. Instead, I buy a single round khobz bread, which is warm because it has come straight from the oven. Phil and I share it in bed with a cup of coffee when I get back to the riad.

The Moroccan breakfast at our riad is the best we’ve had so far, but we feel like going out for breakfast, because we’ve spied a good looking Moroccan breakfast cafe. The lovely old woman who cooks breakfast at the riad seems disappointed we don’t want to eat, only a cup of coffee. “It’s free,” she tells us. I don’t have the heart to tell her we want to try someone else’s breakfast, so I just tell her we don’t always eat breakfast.

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The Moroccan breakfast cafe is good. We have mint tea and freshly squeezed orange juice and very fluffy omelettes. The msemmen is flaky and delicious. We spread some with soft cheese and drizzle it with runny honey; some we drag through a sweet almond paste. Phil has a small tantrum about the number of cats on the street.

We meet a man named Henry Jamieson who lives in Archway. He’s been in Essaouira since November. He has to go back to London today because he’s run out of blood thinners.

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The donut man is open for business. We buy one donut, which costs us the equivalent of 16p. We should buy more, but we don’t have the room in our tummies. The donut is crispy and sweet and probably the most perfect donut I’ve ever eaten.

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Coffee, orange juice and white wine by the beach. We’re served by Mr BMW who notices that we’ve taken to playing cards.

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Lunch at the fish market again, cooked for us by the same family. I would’ve liked to have supported another family, but the one we’ve been served by on two occasions now is lovely. The young boy who runs the “restaurant” is pleased we’ve come back. What I like is that everyone buys fish from the same five stalls, and that there doesn’t appear to be much competition between the different families that run small restaurants. They seem to operate a system of taking turns to welcome each customer or group of customers to their establishment.

Lunch is the same combination of fish, salad, fries, harissa, olives and bread. Today we have deep fried pieces of the fish that seems popular and prevalent, dorad, and fillets of tuna that are cooked under the charcoal grill.

We order two Cokes. The oldest of the two brothers sends his younger brother off to a nearby shop to buy two bottles of Coke for us.

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While Phil is reading on the roof of the riad, I walk to a biscuit shop that I have read about. When I arrive, I am a little perplexed, as I had expected to see cabinets full of biscuits. Instead, there are a few trays of biscuits underneath plastic cloches in the shop’s windows, and large plastic crates with clip on lids full of biscuits behind the counter. The young man who is serving customers tells me that the lights don’t always work, and then helps me to choose an assortment of biscuits, which he carefully places into a small cardboard box.

Then I go to the illicit booze shop. It’s not illicit, really, it just feels that way. You arrive at a shop that has no signage, a shop that I would describe as being “Clean Skin”. Inside, there are makeshift shelves full of bottles of alcohol, which you can only access if you crawl under a small hatch door. Once you’re behind the counter, you wander the shelves and select your plonk of choice. That then gets wrapped in newspaper and put into a black paper bag and you’re sent on your way. I was the only woman in the place. I bought a very cheap bottle of Moroccan white wine (proved to be quite good). The men who ran the shop seemed to think it was hilarious I was there. I thought their operation was hilarious.

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Back to the little restaurant we’d eaten at a few times for dinner. The most delicious thing we ate was a bowl of fish soup. The fish broth was clear, and swimming in it were a few little nuggets of very fresh white fish, and four baby clams. The soup came with a little side plate of finely sliced garlic, finely chopped parsley, a small pile of a mild grated cheese and two little rounds of crostini. We added everything into the soup. It was great. At first Phil thought the garlic looked like cashew.

Day 8

Another breakfast at the breakfast cafe, another donut, another coffee, orange juice and white wine at the beach bar. We could get used to this routine, could be like Henry Jamieson.

The batbout, or Moroccan pita breads, at the breakfast cafe are very good. The bread here has been so, so good.

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We have lunch at a place called Mimti that is run by a young couple, she’s Norwegian and he’s Moroccan, who also own a small farm on the outskirts of Essaouira. They’re big on seasonal food and sustainability and all of those good things. We share slices of homemade sourdough, which tastes like sourdough but looks a bit like bread maker bread (which, I should say, we love), and homemade ricotta with pomegranate molasses, harissa oil and sumac. Then we each have a salad of shredded roast chicken, walnuts, roast beetroot, orange, millet and lots of leafy greens. We’re grateful for the greens.

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It is New Year’s Eve. We regret coming to Marrakesh for New Year’s Eve. It is hard to get into any of the places that serve alcohol without a booking, and most of them are doing set menus for ridiculous prices, and that we don’t like the look of (raw fish and mango salad and foie gras etc). The manager of the riad we’re staying at assures us that we can drink at the riad on the rooftop; he says he’ll get ice for us.

Drinking at the riad turns out to be overly complex. We can’t have bottles of alcohol on the table. The owner must pour our drinks for us. We don’t need wine glasses, but we’re amused that serviettes wrapped around water glasses allegedly hides our booze. The riad’s manager doesn’t have a bottle opener. Despite instructions to send a WhatsApp message each time we want a drink it takes a long time for each drink to arrive. We quickly finish a bottle of champagne, because we’re desperate for mood enhancement after starting our New Year’s Eve with a small alcohol-free beer and bowl of undercooked chips at a nearby cafe. Look, I know things could be much worse.

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We eat dinner at a street food stall that has tables and chairs sprawling down the street. Skewers of chicken, lamb kofta and liver (if you want it) are cooked over hot charcoals. The street is smoky. Your skewers come with fava bean soup, grated tomato salad, olives and bread. There’s more than enough food for two people. Everything costs less than ten quid. It’s great. Our best meal.

Day 9

More biscuit buying before another splish splash at the hammam.

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We go back to the Laila and Layla restaurant. They’re beside themselves to see us. Laila introduces us to her boss, an Italian man from Sicily, who has somehow ended up a restaurant owner in Marrakesh. She tells me that she told her friends she made a new friend from New Zealand who has chubby cheeks.

We get the very good bread and olive oil again, and share the kofte and egg tagine. This time we get the chicken tagine. It comes topped with very delicious homemade fries, which are a great addition, because they soak up all of the lemony juices that the chicken is cooked in.

As we get up to pay, the owner insists that we must sit down, because Laila has insisted that we have tea and biscuits. He’s quick to add that he insisted on us having tea and biscuits too. Laila proudly presents us with a small plate of biscuits that she obviously ran down the street to buy (I saw her running down the street and wondered where she was off to; to take a phone call, I figured). As we leave, Layla gives me five kisses, because “that’s the Moroccan way.”

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We have expensive cocktails at a very flash hotel round the corner from our riad. It’s lovely. Then we go to the street side skewer restaurant again. A game of two halves.

Day 10

Dinner is completely dreadful, and we make a mad dash to get avoid getting caught in a brawl that’s broken out not far from where we’re sitting. The wind has sent people mad. That, and there’s some real big dick grilling meat energy going on.

We’re out of booze when we get back to the riad.

It’s been brilliant here, but it would seem we are ready to go back to London.