Pleased to Meat you, Marrakech - The Meating and More

Lamb Alley

Mechoui Alley.  A strip of vendors all serving one expertly prepared animal, lamb.  The lamb is whole roasted within the restaurants in a hole in the ground.

We ate four times in Meshoui Alley.  The first time, and our first main meal in Marrakech, we dove in head first (don't excuse the pun) and went for half a sheep's head.  The meat around the cheeks was pretty much the essence of lamb. So good.

Nix let me have the eyeball and boy o boy, wowee was it good.  After pulling off the cornea (I think?) I popped it in and savoured its gelatinous, lamby goodness.

But the highlight?  The ear.  Watching hours of Bizarre Food came to the fore here as Nix watched me peel the skin off the ear and divvy it up. Somehow the ear had taken on a smokey character beyond belief and left you asking why don't sheep have more ears?

Next up was the alleys namesake, mechoui.  At 11am they begin to take out the roasted lambs and carve them up with the premium cuts (mechoui) being served fresh in the restaurant with cumin salt, bread and the ubiquitous mint tea.

We'd waited a long, long, long time to have this this and it hurts me to say that we were maybe a bit disappointed by it.  It was beautiful lamb but it wasn't special lamb.

The lamb that isn't served fresh as mechoui is carved up and placed in clay pots with a selection of spices, preserved lemon and water and then taken to the local hammam to sit in the coals and steam for a few hours with the end result known as a tanjia, a Marrakech speciality.   The resulting lamb quite literally melts in your fingers (there is something primitively satisfying about eating with your hands) and is the kind of dish that leaves you sad when you're nearing the end of it.

Patisserie Belkabir

We'd walked past this man's stall in the souk multiple times before we finally relented and picked up a box for our journey out into the desert.  There are two stalls next to each other that look as though they sell the exact same produce however one's pastries are covered in bees and the others is not.  We followed the bees' lead.

Breakfast

This was our breakfast most mornings from a place in the northwest corner of the Djemaa. Bessara (fava bean soup), messemen (a roti like pancake) and a pot of mint tea.

Macaron-Macaroon Ladies

We waited until our final night to try these. Silly us.

Some amazing sort of crunchy outside, chewy inside, Macaron made of macaroons type thing.   Delicious.

Barrie-ometer of "Feel" - an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema 

Pleased to Meat you, Marrakech - The Beating Heart

Djemaa el Fna

Snake charmers, teeth pullers, storytellers, musicians, clairvoyants, acrobats, juice stalls, tea stalls and food stalls selling everything from tagines to lamb's heads. They're all here and they're all playing their part in one of the great spectacles that this planet has to offer. 

All throughout the day you can head down to the Djemaa and grab a freshly squeezed orange juice or have your photo taken with a crazed looking monkey but it's at around 4pm that things really start to heat up. The food stalls move in and the musicians start to play and the centre of Marrakech really begins its assault on everyone of your senses (clichéd description: check).

The Stalls

You could spend weeks working your way through the stalls that roll in each night however we only had six nights and could only try a handful but these were some of our favourites.

Stall 123

We had harira (a simple lentil soup) elsewhere in the Djemaa but we returned to these guys two other times for pre dinner snacks. Theirs just had so much more flavour and so many more big meaty chickpeas - plus genuine thanks that you were eating in their stall - all for 3 dirham a pop. And on our final night we were given a free top up after having passed the loyalty test when the main soup serving man had told us to return the previous night.

Juice Stall 14

Everyday we returned for "deux jus d'orange" and everyday we were treated like long lost friends.

Tea Stall 70 / Tea Stall 71

These two stalls pump out the best spiced tea. It's the addition of fennel seeds and the exceptional balance of the tea made by these guys that sets them apart from the rest. Every night we came and sat down at the tea stalls, watching the madness unfold around us.

It was at stall 70 that we were treated to "super tea" too. Having emptied our glasses, and when we were just about ready to leave, one of the tea servers grabbed our glasses, topped them up and mixed in a mysterious white crystallised looking substance.

Not being ones to ask questions we dived in only to discover that the magic powder was some sort of peppermint like substance and was so potent that we couldn't get the glass to our lips without it burning out our eyeballs and nostrils. Geez did it clear out our nasal passage though.

Tea Price Politics

The standard going rate for spiced tea down at the Djemaa is five dirhams (about 70 cents) however there's one unnumbered tea stall that pops up a bit later than the others each night and sells their tea for two dirhams. What this then does is immediately bring down the price of tea at all of the other stalls.

Which is interesting and sort of confirmed a bit of a theory that I'd earlier been explaining to a very enthused Nicola that the price determinator seems to be a downward movement and regardless of quality other vendors can't afford to not immediately drop their price too.

Stall 3

Our first meal of Marrakech and a goodie to start on. A steaming hot bowl of fresh snails cooked in a beautifully earthy broth. A v good start.

Stall 44

Saving the best til last. The first night we came here we tucked into the creamiest, richest, most tasty lamb's brains we've ever had.

On the following night we came back for beef tongue and a mixed plate of left over bits. What those bits are we weren't exactly sure but let me point out that this stall serves the cuts of meat that are left over after the good bits are taken away for tagines etc. So a mixed plate of bits here is the leftovers of the leftovers.

Some of the interesting things we heard in the Djemaa

"Hey, hey, Johnny Depp" to which I turned around to see a man with a big grin on his face trying to call us back to his stall
"Oh, beautiful girlfriend, like a gazelle" HA!
"You're from Australia? Finger licking good!". I think they're a bit confused on that one
"I spoke to you just before, I said you're Harry Potter's brother"
Nix said no thanks in Arabic to someone to which he cheekily replied, "can you speak Arabic or just la shukran?"
"Australian? You like Home and Away? Neighbours? I prefer The Castle". That's a well researched tout right there

Pleased to Meat you, Marrakech - The Introduction

After 44 hours, two trains, two buses, two flights, walking 10 plus k's with packs and sleeping in Gatwick airport for the night, we arrived in Marrakech to a rabid pack of dogs outside of the airport ready to take us for every dirham that we were worth. At least that's what the interwebs had prepared us for. Instead we walked past a few taxi drivers half heartedly trying to get our business and jumped on a local bus that took us into the centre for just a few bucks.

After four and a bit months in Europe we were in need of a change of scenery, a change of pace and in dire need of some vitamin D. There is no better place to escape the European winter than Morocco and no better place for a change of scenery and pace than Marrakech.

Over these next couple of posts about Marrakech I promise I'll try not to recycle every cliche that has ever been written about this great Moroccan city but sometimes it's inevitable.

Our time in Marrakech is summed up fairly well by the following series of anecdotes.

Shave Time

I thought that it was time to play to my strengths and rid my cheeks of their patches of pubes to roll with the goatee, or the JD look as I prefer to call it.

Nix and I set off on a day of wandering through the souks and after a couple of hours stumbled upon an old school barber so in we went. I waited nervously for him to finish trimming an old man's moustache and then after some dodgy sign language and a series of thumbs ups he began.

First of all he smothered my face with shaving cream and lathered it beyond belief, then commenced the shave, initially with and then against the grain to ensure that my cheeks were as smooth as a baby's behind. Then he moved onto the moustache and he got a bit carried away he but I wasn't going to complain, at this point I was just enjoying the experience. He finished off by giving the goatee a bit of a trim and $1.4 later (which is at least three times what I could've paid) I walked out a very satisfied man.

I think the results speak for themselves.

The joy of seeing someone like him go to work at a craft that he's been perfecting for 50+ years was worth the $1.4 ten times over, let alone the fact that I no longer look like a chipmunk or the victim of a practical joke involving honey and pubic hair.

Nix's Dirty Shoes

Since the moment we arrived in Marrakech men had stopped Nix in the street asking to clean her shoes. After six days of continued offers and hounding by me she finally reneged.

Again, I think the results speak for themselves.

The Fork in the Road Moment

After a couple of days in Marrakech we'd been sucked into a Berber's shop and burned a few dollars on a lucky charm just to get out of there after a man* offered to walk us to a non existent Berber market "free of charge", were swindled out of $5 for a few cactus fruit, paid significantly more than we should have for pots of mint tea and were just generally charged more than we should have for countless other things.

It was after being ripped off yet again that we forlornly walked back to our riad and realised we could either lie down, continue to be outwitted and spend our seven weeks in Morocco being shitty at the deal we're getting or dig out heels in, be smarter with how we try to pay for things and be generous with our money to who we want to be generous towards.

From that moment and since the change of mindset there's only been one or two times that we've been charged a touch more than we should have been and have been given multiple soup and tea top ups that maybe justify our modified approach.

*The most valuable thing we got out of that man was the reason why there are so many cats in Marrakech. Apparently the Quran specifies that cats are allowed into the home and shops, so habitable spaces, whereas dogs are not. That was interesting to us at least.

Jardine Marjorelle

Every now and again when we're travelling for some unknown reason we feel the need to go and do the touristy thing like visit a castle or, in this case, go and check out a well known garden.

We walked half an hour outside of the Medina and arrived at the Jardine Marjorelle, which is a collection of cacti that have been imported from all around the world and attracts swarms of French people after the garden was taken over and restored by Yves Saint Laurent. Entry is about $7 each and whilst that isn't much, in Morocco it's comparatively uber expensive. However given we'd bother to walk there we felt obliged to pay the entry fee and check it out.

Literally within seconds of entering we were regretting our decision. Whilst the garden is nice and exceptionally well manicured you can easily do a walk around within 15 minutes and leave wondering why you could've got almost a kilo of lamb for the same price. Travelling fail.

Barrie-ometer of "Feel" - it gets particularly interesting at around page 47