Archive for the ‘Moroccan’ Category
V Rating:VVV Last Sunday I had the pleasure of meeting up with the food-loving bloggers behind Grab Your Fork, Pickles Perks, Cucina Rebecca, Limes and Lycopenes, and Morsels and Musings, the last two for the first time. We’d heard tell that the breakfast banquet at Kazbah on Darling was worth blogging about, so made the trek to Balmain. Obviously we weren’t the only ones in the know - there were people waiting outside by 11am and inside the tables were full. Perhaps the reason for Kazbah’s popularity is its unique offering amongst the crowded Sydney brunch scene. Rather that the standard eggs on toast or big breakfast, Kazbah has a large spread of dishes hailing from Northern Africa, Morocco and the Middle East. There is a good selection of savoury and sweet dishes, which we dutifully explored.
I was excited to try the fuul medammas, because I’ve heard vegetarians live on this dish in Egypt. I’ll be there for three weeks in September so wanted to know what I was in for. I really liked the mix of chickpeas and fava beans, which are roughly blended to create a thick paste that has a smooth, subtle flavour. You eat it on bread with feta and shallots. Yum!
Kazbah bills itself as the “home of the tagine” and true to form offers vegetarian and meat versions for breakfast. The vegetarian tagine consisted of pumpkin, baby spinach, capsicum, carmelised onion and tomato with two poached eggs on top. I was expecting the tagine to be stew-like, but actually it was a baked dish that somehow preserved the freshness of the vegetables, particularly the spinach. The warm rice pudding with saffron poached pears and hazelnuts was my pick of the sweet dishes. The rice was firm and large, and was lovely in the creamy sauce. Also, it was topped with saffron poached pear.
I was in two minds about the sweet cous cous. On the one hand, it was topped with a generous serving of stewed magenta rhubarb. On the other hand, the cous cous looked and tasted like it had been soaked in a super sweet golden syrup which was a bit much for my system at that time of the morning. A pretty glass of cardamon milk came with it, and was meant to be tipped over the cous cous. It helpfully softened the taste and texture.
Last but not least was the strawberry pancake. Emily from Pickles Perks had warned us not to choose the chocolate version because it was too rich. This was a wise call. The strawberry pancake was huge, and had a thick fluffy texture that bore more resemblance to a cake than than a pancake. The strawberries were baked into the top, and the whole dish was smothered in double cream and syrup. Somehow I managed to have two slices, for which I deserve a place in the brunch hall of fame. Naturally food, restaurants and food and restaurant scandals were hot topics of conversation amongst the assembled bloggers. But it was also nice to discover that we had other things in common, like a love of travel, weddings, and the Meaning of Life. There’s already talk of another meet up later in the year, and I can’t wait to see everyone again when we’re back from overseas.
V Rating: VVVVV Entering the Moroccan Soup Bar [MSB] often requires two attempts- hungry eaters beware! The first attempt almost always involves opening the door to be met by a waitress shaking her head- you want a table? No worries, come back in an hour (if you’re lucky)*. But when you enter the second time, with the confident swagger of a diner who has a table waiting for you and your posse, it becomes clear very quickly that a table at MSB is well worth the wait. As one of a cast of ‘Melbourne Institutions’ MSB is one of those places I’ve always meant to go to since I returned to the Victorian capital. Two and a half years later, here I am with my best friend, another good friend and my best friend’s new girlfriend who I was meeting for the first time. It was a night of ‘firsts’ and all were excellent. MSB produces Moroccan-inspired vegetarian food- and it’s not always (in fact, I’m informed, not often) soup. The style and presentation of the food reflects the décor- warm and comforting with minimal fuss. The atmosphere is vibrant and noisy- it feels like your sitting at someone’s kitchen table, eating off the everyday mismatched crockery rather than the ‘good china’. The decoration is eclectic- on one side the wall is filled with shelves that hold various Moroccan-style vases, jugs and crockery. The room is brightly painted in deep shades of brown, red, aqua-green- they reverberate the warmth generated in this busy restaurant. A small glass of mint tea arrives as soon as you’re seated. It is warm and refreshing- with more bite to it than I expected. Then owner Hana Assafiri arrives. She is a slight yet commanding presence in this small restaurant- she definitely runs the show. She offers us the choice of the spoken menu (there is no written menu to peruse) or the $16.50 banquet that includes entrée, mains, coffee and sweets. Food allergies and intolerances are catered for- Assafiri checks with us if these are an issue. The banquet is recommended as the most economical option and we opt for it. We’ve also arrived unexpectedly during Assafiri’s crusade to ensure people are educating themselves and thinking about issues bigger than the immediate desire to satiate our appetites. Of four of us, two have seen An Inconvenient Truth. They are to dine for free she informs us. It’s a policy that may run her out of business- one night last week she had a restaurant full of people who had all seen it. Within two minutes the entrée arrives. A plate of flat, warm pide arrives, carved in big triangles for us to enjoy with the platter of dips and other goodies that are placed in the centre of the table. The platter includes house-made hummus, marinated carrots, olives and a cauliflower dip. It’s a generous serve and once you’ve begun it’s difficult to stop. Self-control is essential here. Around fifteen minutes later the mains arrive- all at once they are placed in the middle of the table. The banquet. Tonight’s banquet includes lentil dhal with saffron rice and a vegetable stew with spicy vegetable rice. The stew has a rich tomato-base with large chunks of carrot and zucchini through it and a little bit of heat and spice to warm us up. There is also a chick pea bake which two of my companions familiar with MSB meet with delight. It is a dish made with just-cooked chick peas (another reminder why preparing chickpeas from scratch is so much better than those from the can), slivered almonds and spices with tahini and yoghurt to bind it together. To add to the texture of the dish there are crunchy pieces of baked and crumbled oven-baked flat bread (pide) through it. Delicious. The food is generous and presented in a way that celebrates a way of eating that is about sharing good food and eating together. Much later after we have eaten more than we needed, sweets arrive. They consist of a small plate of delights (including a slice with a crushed pistachio-centre) served with a traditional cardamom coffee. They are ‘sweet’ in the subtle way of Middle Eastern treats. A perfect way to conclude a hearty meal. The MSB is an experience for any occasion (although be warned that it isn’t licensed) - the banquet can cater from two to a room full of people and the menu changes frequently. If you’re looking for somewhere informal, relaxed and intimate- MSB will hit the spot. *Luckily three doors down is a very cosy bar, Deco, where you can pass the time in a deep lounge chair, a comfortable couch or around one of the small tables that are placed through the main bar. Drinks from the bar include a range of imported and local beers and a small selection of Australian wines by the glass.
V Rating: VV Don’t make the mistake of taking a bottle of wine to Mecca Bah, the Moroccan and middle eastern restaurant that has added a new Canberra outlet to its Melbourne and Brisbane branches – it is fully licensed but not BYO. After overcoming that minor embarrassment, I join my friends in the large, covered outdoor area which is on the deck of Manuka Terrace. The outdoor seating area is expansive and has a nice vibe. It is a warm enough evening, and the accordion-style glass windows are open, so it all feels pleasingly summery. After the incident with the wine bottle, we examine the wine menu and discover that the house white and red are $24 each – surely a bit steep for a house wine? One of my friends informs me that the waitress had said she would come and “explain” the menu to us once we had all arrived. I am inherently suspicious of any place that has a menu that needs to be “explained”. I am also inherently suspicious of any place that refuses to take bookings. What is with that? The waitress kindly informs us that the first page of the menu was mezze – “that’s kind of like tapas”, she says, in case we didn’t know. (Perhaps I am just being facetious, but if someone doesn’t know the meaning of mezze, are they likely to be aware of what tapas is?) The waitress encourages us to order several and share them. The vegetarian options on the mezze menu sound tasty: fattoush (a salad of Lebanese bread in wine), vegetarian chick pea and lentil soup, beetroot and yoghurt salad, Tunisian carrot salad, tabouleh, sweet potato felafels, olives, and bread with dips. My friend chooses the vegetarian soup ($8.50), and the rest of us decide to share the Turkish bread with dips ($11) and the carrot salad ($7.50). For mains ($16-$17), the vegetarian options are a roast vegetable tagine (“that’s like a stew served on cous cous”, explains the waitress again), and two types of Turkish pizza (“these are on a thin bread shaped like a boat and with the edges curled up”) – zucchini with cheeses, mint and lemon, and roast pumpkin, chilli, pomegranate jam and feta. On the waitress’s advice I order the zucchini pizza. When the Turkish bread and dips arrives, it involves sizable dollops of labna, hommous and baba ghanoush, and three rather large pieces of Turkish bread. The soup comes in a very large bowl and is a generous serve. The carrot salad likewise comes in a very large bowl, but it could not be called a generous serve. In fact, the serving is hardly even the size of a side dish for one person, let alone an amount to share. It looks even more minuscule given the massive plate it comes on. $7.50 for this? The three of us who are sharing it each allocate ourselves four small pieces of carrot from the twelve on the plate. They are delectable, and so it is even more disappointing that the serve was so small. So we order ourselves another plate of bread ($4) to go with the dips, which are very flavoursome, and stuff ourselves with this. Alas, by the time the mains come I think we have all eaten too much bread. My zucchini pizza is pleasing enough, and the lemon juice provides a nice zest to the taste of the zucchini, but I am unable to finish it. My friend who chose the vegetarian tagine says it is good, and spicy. Mecca Bah has an interesting array of other vegetarian selections on the mezze menu, but if these were all of the same small portion as the carrot salad, then I frankly don’t think they’re worth it. The vegetarian selection in mains is OK – three dishes – but not great. I’m giving this place a VV. The food was tasty, but unduly expensive. Add to that the pricey wine and no BYO, and it made for an expensive night. Vegetarians would get more choice and better value elsewhere. AC |
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