Philippe, the Frenchman who rented us our riad, told us not to eat in the food stalls of the medina until our third day when our stomachs had adjusted, so naturally we ended up there on our first night. We couldn't help it; it's where all the locals were, women eating soup beneath their hijabs and men drinking mint tea and eating piles of dried dates with their hands.
Around 4pm, the stalls rise up out of nowhere, anchored by little trucks or carts that support the beams that hold the tarp that creates the ceiling. The grills are lit and the soup pots begin to boil and the displays of produce and meat on sticks are arranged in front of the kitchens. This all happens in about 20 minutes.
There are dozens of stalls, lined up one after the other, crammed with long tables flanked by benches, filled with smoke and vendors calling to you as you pass. All the stalls have numbers and for the most part, that's how they differentiate themselves. A guy from Number 22, young and funny and persistent, found us almost every night with a fresh pitch. One night he caught us on our way out of another food stall and told Read he looked so skinny and so lanky that he needed to eat a second dinner. He called out Number 22 like he was repping a gang. It was great.
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| Stall Number 1 |
The first night we had mint tea, which is a must. Moroccans have a SERIOUS sweet tooth and they take their tea with a massive cube of sugar. They eat their soup (and they all eat one kind of soup, harira, which is thickened with chickpeas and thin noodles and lentils) with a plate of dates and a sweet called chebakia made from fried dough and honey and sesame. We were in a restaurant one night and the man next to us asked for a plate of sugar cubes to munch on while he waited for his meal.
The vendors in the medina will try to rip you off. We were constantly being ripped off for a few dirhams here and there. Toward the end of the week we understood what things cost and we disputed our bill in really terrible French. The vendors would smile like we caught them and they were proud of us and give us our correct bill. It was all very friendly.
Some tips on eating in the food stalls:
- You will be charged for "bread and sauce" which is brought to you automatically, whether you eat it or not. This only happens in the medina. Outside the medina, the bread is typically free.
- Wait to eat until the stalls are fairly crowded. We ate too early one day, when they had just set up, and the food was most definitely old.
- Don't let them bring you more than you ordered. If you ordered one item to share and they bring you two (which happened often, it's one of their little tricks), send it back.
One of our favorite snacks was these peanuts we bought from roving medina nut vendors. They were candied with honey and sesame and fennel seeds and better than anything we've had in the states. The way you buy them is by telling the vendor how much you want to spend (10 dirhams will get you a nice snack for two people) and he'll rip off a sheet of paper from an old Arabic text book (really, we got geometry), fashion it into a cone and fill it with nuts.
The same goes for dried fruit and spices. Tell the man how much you're willing to spend and he'll make you a little bag.
In the end, we ate everything we weren't supposed to: fresh salads and drinks from unsealed containers and street meats and food touched by the hands of many, many people with questionable hand washing practices. But we didn't get sick. Maybe the grapefruit seed extract saved us (we took it after every sketchy meal). Or perhaps our stomachs have simply been through adequate abuse in our regular life. Either way, we felt victorious.
Lastly, this was happening almost every night:
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| Fishing For Soda |
You two are amazing! You know that if I was with you, I would be doing the exact same thing. Risky business... Yay for grapefruit seed extract!!!
ReplyDeleteHugs, Mommy