Taste of Morocco, Silver Spring, Md.

For the contrast, we also tried and considered Moroccan food from Taste of Morocco in Silver Spring, Md. I've eaten before at their location in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, but this is the first I've been to the Silver Spring location. Silver Spring is larger and the decor is more elaborate, but I missed the infectious enthusiasm and constant encouragements to taste new things from the proprietor at Clarendon.

The food is always good at Taste of Morocco. We opted to share a "Zenata" Moroccan feast for two.

The meal opened with a "royal salad," a combination of their four main salads, a cucumber and tomato in vinaigrette salad, eggplant and tomato sauce salad, baba ghannouge ( eggplant with tahini, lemon juice, and garlic), and hummos. The hummos was my favorite.

Next came a chicken bastilla, a delicious dish that I think is unique to Morocco. Using round disks of phyllo dough, they stuff the bastilla with chicken, almonds, and onions, bake the rounds, then dust them with cinnamon confectioner's sugar before serving. The combination is sweet but mouthwateringly good.



Next came the main course, the royal couscous. I've long been a fan of couscous, and what they make here in unusually fine and delicate. Couscous, of course, is tiny, tiny pieces of semolina pasta that is indigenous to Morocco, but it's been exported to France, where it's popular there much as regular pastas from Italy are here in the U.S. In this version, the couscous serves as a bed for a saffron-scented stew of lamb shank, lamb merguez sausage, roasted chicken, and seven vegetables. I thought it interesting that the vegetables included acorn squash—a vegetable indigenous to the Americas—but the squash was delicious in the combination.

For dessert, our waitress brought us a platter of assorted Moroccan pastries, the exact identities of which I have no clue. They were good, being mostly of the dry, crunchy cookie variety. The waitress made a show of pouring our Moroccan mint tea (a lovely but very sweet, hot, mint tea) into clear glass drinking glasses to have with our desserts.





I enjoyed our meal at Taste of Morocco, though I thought the service was a bit off, an unusual thing since it was hardly busy in there due to the heavy rainstorms that day. It's not that they were inattentive, because they were there tending to us often, I think it was just the finer points. For example, we had but one set of knife, fork, and spoon, and in between courses, even if they were dirty, the waitress would take them off our plates and set them back down on the table so we could reuse them for the next course.