Tangier, Part Two

            I wish I had a photo, because words can’t describe how beautiful the view from Tangier was. Of course, a photograph can’t really do it justice either, but then you could at least get an idea of the lovely blue sky, the dark blue ocean, and the hazy purplish blue mountains of Spain in the distance.

            After drinking our fill of the evening view of the strait of Gibraltar from both a vista in the kasbah, the fortified corner of the medina, and from an overlook further west in a snazzy residential neighborhood, we turned back towards the ville nouveau for dinner. We wandered through busy, brightly lit streets until the smell of pizza stopped us in our tracks. The unmistakable smell of oven-fresh pizza, our first whiff since coming to Morocco, lured us into Oslo Restaurant. I have no idea where the name comes from, but the food was delicious and the place was full of young Moroccans. My vegetarian pizza had cheese and just enough vegetables, and was delicious doused in the hot sauce on the table, which served a double purpose as a decongestant as I found myself coming down with a cold. We also discovered a new meaning for the word “quality”. The burger section of the menu included a hamburger, a cheeseburger, an eggburger, and a qualityburger.

            “Excuse me,” our friend asked the waiter. “What’s on a qualityburger?”

            The man was taken aback that we didn’t know, and just to make sure we weren’t totally clueless, he started at the beginning. “A hamburger is just the burger,” he patiently explained. “The cheeseburger is the same but with cheese. The egg burger is the hamburger but with egg. And the qualityburger,” he finished with a smile, “is a hamburger with cheese and egg.” Of course!

            Dinner was phenomenal – pizza of quality (not qualitypizza, we joked, since although it had cheese, it lacked egg), and we left the restaurant with only the smallest smidgen of room for dessert. Moroccan cities are filled with patisseries, one of colonization’s legacies and one that I would hesitate to lament. The particular bakery we stopped in had a wide array of both traditional Moroccan cookies and fancy French cakes. A golden slice topped with what looked like slivered almonds caught my eye, and at only 5 dh I couldn’t resist ordering it. The topping turned out to be wheat flakes, and the cake whole wheat sweetened with honey and maybe date syrup. Not what I expected, but wholesome and incredibly delicious nonetheless. We took our sweet purchases and took a table at the attached café among a few scattered tables of men drinking tea, eyes glued to the Dutch soccer match on television. Most cafés have large televisions, as their clientele would surely go elsewhere if they had to have their afternoon tea without a soccer game to watch.

            Although we didn’t dine at them due to the unfortunate fact that our stomachs had reached capacity, we were very taken with the fluorescent-lit second-floor restaurants and cafés lining Tangier’s main streets. They offered gorgeous views over the strait with European style…definitely a destination for the next time I’m in Tangier. (Which will actually be Thursday – we are going through on our way to Spain, where we’ll be spending three nights as a group in Cordoba and Granada.)

            After another hour of wandering the bright and crowded streets, we decided to look for Caid’s Piano Bar, the prototypical Moroccan bar that supposedly inspired the famous Rick’s Café (the movie Casablanca was actually filmed in Hollywood, so Rick’s Café itself didn’t exist until an entrepreneurial British woman opened a place by the same name a few years ago). Caid’s is located inside a hotel, but we didn’t know that, so we literally walked by it a few times thinking aloud, “But it’s supposed to be right here!” Perplexed, I decided to ask an older Moroccan woman on the terrace of a nearby café for help. As I hoped, she spoke Spanish, so I was able to explain our predicament quite fluently. She hadn’t heard of Caid’s – I realized as I was asking her that an older Moroccan woman was probably of the wrong demographic to ask about a place of libations – but she knew there was a bar up around the corner. I thanked her profusely and we headed off, only to find Dean’s Bar, fully occupied by older Moroccan men and a cloud of smoke. It was not the scene we were looking for so we soldiered on and I found another woman to ask. She didn’t know, but in the headstrong way that many Spanish women have (I quickly started thinking of her as Spanish since that’s what we were speaking, despite her head-scarf and jellaba) proceeded to suggest to us/order us to ask the men at a nearby hanoot. They didn’t know either, so we resorted to plan c and called our friend who had been in Tangier the weekend before. While on the phone with him at an intersection between a busy street and a smaller road leading downhill into darkness, the original woman I’d asked for directions passed by us. She recognized us and asked if we’d found it yet, and I explained that the bar she’d told us about wasn’t the one we were looking for but that we were on the phone with our friend now. “Good,” she said. “But don’t go down that street!” She pointed in the direction of the darkness. “It’s very dangerous! Continue up this way!” She pointed down the well-lit boulevard. Oh, how I love Spanish-speaking Moroccan women! Meanwhile, our friend enlightened us as to the fact that Caid’s was inside the hotel we’d passed about three times, so we returned and entered this time.

            We found ourselves in a beautiful courtyard with serene bubbling fountains and wicker furniture. A doorway seeping soft piano music opened into Caid’s, where a huge dark wooden bar faced giant floor-to-ceiling windows with red velvet curtains, and a piano in the middle of the bi-leveled room. The music was currently coming from a stereo, since it was slightly before ten. We settled into plushy upholstered chairs and a low couch around smart wooden tables and waited for the server to take our order. To keep up with our classy surroundings, we ordered a bottle of red wine and a cheese plate to share. Although drinking wine is explicitly prohibited by the Qur’an, Morocco has a robust share of vineyards that make pretty good reds and roses (and possibly whites – I haven’t tried any yet). Our waiter returned with the bottle and glasses, and poured perfectly until spilling a little on the third glass. “Mashi muskela!” we assured him, “No problem!” (The phrase had become the motto of our easy-going trip.) He returned about ten minutes later with the cheese, carrying two plates. “One is yours,” he said, and with a flourish set down a second. “And one is a gift!” If a little spilt wine meant extra cheese, then I am certainly glad his hand slipped! The cheese was phenomenal, almost definitely imported, and served with tart fruity raisins and toasted marcona almonds from Spain. We also stuck our toothpicks into a little dish of complementary olives. The three flavours – the heavy-bodied wine, the rich camembert and tangy Iberico cheeses, and the salty olives – complimented each other wonderfully, with the now live piano music making the scene utterly perfect. We felt just like stars in Casablanca, lingering and listening to the piano and the low murmurs of the other customers, watching the delicate smoke curl up from their cigarettes like we’d gone sixty years back in time.

            Finally and unfortunately sleep overcame us, and we walked out into the now-empty streets and back to our hotel. After a gloriously hot and long shower I finally collapsed into bed, warm, clean, and wonderfully content.