Morocco Bound By Tama Janowitz 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. Poets on the Menu By FLORENCE FABRICANT Published: April 11, 2007 To celebrate National Poetry Month, starting this week, a number of restaurants, including Blue Hill, Lupa and Riverdale Garden, will feature menu poems, menus written by poets. The campaign has been organized by Alimentum: The Literature of Food, a quarterly of food writing, and a list of the participating restaurants is available at alimentumjournal.com. On Monday at 7 p.m. there will be a reading of the menu poems at the Tagine Dining Gallery, 537 Ninth Avenue (40th Street): (212) 564-7292. $25 AND UNDER; A Moroccan Outpost in the Shadow of the Port Authority By ERIC ASIMOV Published: March 21, 2001 BEYOND Lotfi's, a theater district old-timer, and one or two others, Moroccan restaurants have been as rare as starry nights in Manhattan. But in the last year several new ones have opened, including Le Souk in the East Village, Sago on the Lower East Side and Tagine near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. While the East Village and the Lower East Side have authentic bohemian credentials, both neighborhoods are in metamorphosis, as art galleries and boutiques redecorate the streets. The new Moroccans downtown reflect their neighborhoods' heightened sense of style. But Ninth Avenue near the bus terminal is as gritty and nondescript as ever. Though Tagine is self-conscious enough to call itself a ''dining gallery,'' it is, in the true bohemian spirit, a low-budget operation. Tagine's dim, alluring dining room seems a blizzard of colors and styles. Mismatched plywood tables are painted sky blue. Tapestries and pillow-strewn banquettes offer a joyful cacophony of patterns, and the walls are lined with artworks. (Hence ''dining gallery.'') Apart from the triptych mural of Moroccan folk scenes, they have little in common thematically, adding to the scrambled look of the room. In the front is a small stage, where jazz bands play nightly after 9:30; downstairs is a lounge area for other performances. On my first visit, the languorous service fed my concern that food was not the focus here, but when appetizers arrived, I began to relax. Zaalouk ($5.50), an eggplant purée rich with the dusky aroma of cumin and dressed with charmoula, a blend of garlic, lemon juice, coriander and olive oil, was wonderful on freshly baked bread. Roasted pepper salad ($7) was tart and refreshing, while a blend of sautéed collard greens, spinach and kale ($6.50) was fresh and bright in its lemon and olive oil dressing. Pickled carrots ($4.50) were pleasant though sweet, while plump grilled merguez sausages ($9.50), surrounding a mound of the pepper salad, were savory yet mild. All seemed big enough to serve two. Couscous is expected at any Moroccan restaurant, and Tagine's does not disappoint. The fluffy heap of semolina grains is perfectly moist but not wet, served with carrots, zucchini and potatoes cooked until soft and topped with a selection of mellow lamb ($18.50) or lemony chicken ($16.50), served on the bone, or the merguez ($17). The couscous is mild, almost demanding a shot of harissa, or hot sauce. Tagine says it uses pheasant in its pastilla ($18), the sweet and savory dish of flaky pastry stuffed with meat, spices and nuts, but like snake, alligator and too many other things, it tastes like chicken. Nonetheless, it's an excellent though enormous portion, flavored with cinnamon and almonds, with just the right interplay of textures between crisp pastry layers and chewy meat. The restaurant's signature tagines, fragrant stews served in traditional earthenware vessels with conical lids, are the least satisfying of the main courses. Still, I liked the meaty yet tender chicken tagine ($16), in a sweet and tart lemony broth with olives, and the meaty chunks of lamb shank ($18), sweetened with prunes, almonds and sesame seeds. But the lamb kefta tagine ($16) was so dull not even the harissa could help. Tagine offers a full bar and a brief wine list, including a grapey Moroccan red. Desserts ($6.95) can be excellent, like semolina cake soaked in orange blossom water. Almond and pistachio cookies get the same floral treatment. Desserts come with sweetened mint tea, which I love. One waitress was able to pour it the traditional way, lifting the metal pot high above the glass cup to pour a foaming stream. Another had to wear an oven mitt simply to grasp the pot. Such are the contradictions in this odd but satisfying little place. Tagine Dining Gallery 537 Ninth Avenue, near 40th Street, Clinton; (212) 564-7292. BEST DISHES: Eggplant purée, roasted pepper salad, sautéed greens, grilled merguez, couscous, pastilla, chicken tagine, lamb with prunes tagine, semolina cake, cookies. A highlight of Ninth Avenue’s international-food strip, Tagine adds a belly dancing tummy twirl to every pheasant pie, Tuesdays through Sundays. And there are more types of couscous on the menu than rings on the dancers’ fingers. Recommended Dishes Grilled Merguez sausage, $17.95; Bastilla pheasant pie, $20.95; chicken Meisel, $20.95 MENUPOEMS READING In honor of National Poetry Month, Alimentum, a food-oriented literary journal, recently produced a special menu-size broadside featuring short, pithy poems about eating, which it has distributed to local restaurants. On April 16 at 7, a number of the participating poets—including Doug Magee, Robin Hirsch, Gary J. Whitehead, and Esther Cohen (who came up with the idea)—read from the work. (Tagine Dining Gallery, Ninth Ave. at 40th Port Authority Area as an Exotic and Alluring Destination It's tough to believe something this beautiful has taken root in the dingy area just west of Port Authority, where overhead ramps convey exhaust-belching buses and motorists jockey to escape through the Lincoln Tunnel. But like a rose that blossoms out of a sidewalk crack, Tagine sweetens its neighborhood with an exotic and alluring perfume. Inside the sumptuous two-story space, spicy citrus scents waft from the Magic Square (Bacardi, orange-blossom water, preserved lemons, and Rémy Red; $12). The uncommon bouquet of Algerian red wine Chateau Tellagh 2000 ($7) and Moroccan red Amazir Beni M'Tir 2001 ($8) evokes the High Atlas. Diners and drinkers gather on Wednesdays to absorb traditional Moroccan music, and on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for belly dancing that gets interactive and daring (when a sword joins the show). Moroccan-style lamps, curtains, and seating create an understated elegance; an art exhibition, instead of overwrought tapestries or tiles, graces the brick walls. And check out the napkins—saved from the now demolished El Morocco club, which ruled New York nightlife in the '40s. North Africans frequent the semicircular bar in the rear, and Maghreb-philes might end up conversing in French, sipping hot mint tea, and sampling olives as their sense of place dissolves in a mélange of sensory delights. What a shock to step outside and find not camels and dunes, but noisy, stinky midtown instead.