Description: Morocco – 08/05/09
Regular readers may have noticed that I’m a big fan of
Moroccan cuisine. Which is why I’m quite annoyed with Manchester. Not just because I could only track down one Moroccan restaurant in the city. But also because other Mancunians don’t seem to have caught on to how good the food is!
8 o’clock on a Friday night. Paul and I had come up from the city centre on the Metro to Prestwich.
Le Tagine is right in the heart of the town, just off Bury New Road. Inside the restaurant is decorated with North African pottery and the sort of paintings that transported me back to my 2004 holiday in Morocco. And it was empty, on what should have been one of the busiest nights of the week.
The only other diners we saw all evening entered just after Paul and I had ordered. And surprise, surprise – we knew them. Ed, who works in London, and had only previously been able to join us for
Russia and
Argentina, came in with his parents to celebrate his dad’s birthday. In fact, it was his parents who had first tipped us off as to the existence of Le Tagine. So this made a grand total of five customers on a Friday evening. By the time we left at 10.30 we saw no others.
As I said, this is a great shame because Moroccan food is yummy. Paul and I ordered a pot of mint tea. This came boiling hot and very sweet. Bread and a pot of olives were brought to the table on the house. Then our starters arrived. We had both plumped for
harira. This is a brown chick pea and lentil soup. Served alongside were a couple of sticky-sweet dates and a wedge of lemon. This latter we were advised to squeeze into the soup – and indeed this did add a lovely twist to the taste.
For main courses, there were seven different tagines to choose from. A
tagine is both the traditional earthenware cooking pot with a conical lid, and also the stew that is cooked in it. I went for a lamb tagine (£10.00), which I knew as
agneau avec prunes in Morocco. The lamb was accompanied with prunes in a sizzlingly-hot sauce. This latter was apparently flavoured with
ras el hanout, a Moroccan mixture of (according to the menu) ‘as many as twenty one spices’. I accompanied this with couscous – real couscous, not the grated cassava I had been served at
another restaurant earlier in the week. Accordingly, this had more taste to it. Paul ordered the fish tagine (£11.00). The fish in question was mackerel. The only awkward thing was that it was hard to debone the fish in the restaurant’s atmospheric low light. Quite amusingly, he was part way through eating when the chef rushed out to apologise that she had completely forgotten to add olives in whilst cooking the dish. She told the waitress to knock 50p off the bill in recompense!
When we finished our meal we were asked whether we wanted dessert. This would be orange blossom water ice cream. Which sounded pretty interesting! We were told this would be brought to us if we wanted to wait upstairs. Upstairs was another world. A large room had been hung with sheets and carpets, its couches adorned with plump cushions, as if to resemble a desert nomad’s tent. The ice creams were produced on ornate low tables. The entire thing was very atmospheric. The ice creams were quite odd tasting though, perfumed rather than flavoured. It was not necessarily a bad taste, just unusual. But we ate them up as we lounged on the cushions like a party of contented Berbers.
The final bill for Paul and I came to just over £40.00 (minus the 50p for the missing olives!). And for £20.00 each we had enjoyed a very good meal. As Manchester’s only Moroccan restaurant Le Tagine deserves to be known about more widely, and patronised more heavily. I see no reason why people should not be prepared to make the (easy) trip up north from the city centre to enjoy this wonderful food. At present the restaurant is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings (7pm onwards). I think it is our duty to ensure that this fab little nook survives the recession and continues to bring a slice of exotic Marrakesh to grimy Manchester.
Close