Taste of Morocco, Arlington, Va.

Earlier tonight Robert went to Clarendon with me to help move some furniture around in my office and take a bunch of books up to fill my bookcases. We decided to eat dinner there. The first couple of places we tried were closed, but we noticed that the dozen or so ethnic restaurants in the area were all open, so we headed to one Robert hadn't tried, Taste of Morocco, the Moroccan place I discovered a couple of weeks ago.

They were doing pretty good business for a Sunday night in a small, out of the way, restaurant location. People continued to come in the entire time we were there.

Robert, being unfamiliar with Moroccan foods, wanted to try one of the set dinners for two, so we picked the Walima dinner. As always, the meal starts with complimentary bread and some delicious, garlicky black olives. All together, they brought soup and salad. The harrira soup is an interesting blend of chickpeas, lentils, and rice served with a particularly unique traditional spoon, a hemisphere on a long handle. Salad was an assortment of cucumber salad, cooked carrot salad, and an eggplant salad.



Next, as a sort of hot appetizer, we got a chicken bastilla to share. The bastilla is a mixture of chicken, almonds, onion, and spices wrapped in layers of crispy phyllo dough, then flattened into a disk and baked; it is garnished with cinnamon and powdered sugar before being served, and that garnish gives the dish an unexpected sweetness.



Our main courses each arrived in traditional tagine cone-shaped pottery dishes. One was a chicken tagine with lemons and green olives and the other was a lamb tagine with raisins and almonds. A plate of saffron rice accompanied the meats.




After the meal, they brought us a plate with a banana, apple, and orange and a pot of hot, sweet, Moroccan mint tea. It was a sweet ending to a very enjoyable evening.