‘Tajine’
Sometimes you get to pick your food, and sometimes you don’t. Usually I try to avoid reviewing places that I don’t choose my meals, but in Morocco I ended up eating at a few of my hotels without a choice. Fortunately, one of these hotels was Dar Amazir in the town of Agdz.
On our way back from the Sahara, we stopped in Nkob for lunch at a spot creatively named Kasbah Nkob. The place had a pretty stellar view of the city and surrounding oasis, but you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about their food. And this food looked almost exactly like it was pulled from the book of generic Moroccan food for tourists. Except for one thing.
While “riad” may be a common word for “hotel” in Morocco, due to the French influence in the country, “auberge” comes up pretty often as well. So when we stayed right next to the Sahara in Merzouga our hotel was called Auberge Les Roches. Auberge Le Sable would probably have been a more appropriate name, but whatevsies. As with a couple other stops, our hotel was also our restaurant for the night and that could only mean one thing: tajine.
On the way to the Sahara Desert, we stopped at a place called Restaurant Inass in Tinghir. Despite the name of the place, I assumed the was served in the mouth as opposed to…well…the name of the place. The restaurant had a deep back outdoor area and we found ourselves a seat. And before our meal came out, we were brought a nice little dish of noodles with nuts, cinnamon and sugar. But that’s not all.
When the drive to your hotel requires a 10 minute stretch down a dirt road in pitch black with no lights to be seen, restaurant options can be very limited. And by limited I mean that the meal can be nowhere other than the hotel’s terrace. Fortunately the hotel was Chez Talout in Skoura and was a sort of mini resort that even sported its own hammam.
When we first arrived in Marrakesh, we were in need of a snack. And while many of the restaurants in the Medina’s Djemaa Al Fnaa (also known as the Big Square), had the word “snack” in their names, we set our sights on Restaurant Chez Chegrouni. The menu was filled with what you might expect from a Moroccan restaurant: couscous and tajine (or tagine depending on the part of the menu).