Aicha serves flavorful Moroccan food at popular prices
By Meredith Brody
published: September 16, 2009
At
Aicha, a modest new Moroccan restaurant on Polk Street, you ll get all
the highlights you d find on the menus of fancier North African places
around town — garlicky dips; b stilla, a pie stuffed with chicken;
long-stewed tagines seasoned with cumin and paprika; grilled kebabs
served with saffron rice — but without the belly-dancing that often
comes with the pricey prix-fixe.
There isn t room for a floor show — the open kitchen takes up almost half the space of the simple storefront, where there s seating for about 30 at sturdy wood tables. Care has been taken to create a pleasant setting without spending too much: The walls are painted peach with terracotta accents, and multicolored glass Moroccan lanterns are positioned around the kitchen. The ceiling is dominated by an unfortunately huge and industrial-looking exhaust pipe.But you ll overlook the decor when the food arrives, though you might still be sad to find there s no alcohol served — Aicha is halal, which, among other things, prohibits pork and alcohol. Almost everything on the menu costs less than $10 except for a couscous royale with chicken, lamb, and merguez, which is ample enough for two at $13. Moroccan food combines elements of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and African cooking, with heady hints of turmeric, ginger, and coriander. At Aicha, despite the low prices, you ll find such sophisticated touches as freshly toasted almonds and sesame seeds. Among the more familiar tagines and kebabs, we found a few surprises, including particularly deep-flavored vegetarian dishes and a meatball-and-egg dish we d never seen before.
We sampled four of the six starters on offer. Zaalook ($4) was a garlicky, peppery mash of eggplant and tomatoes, heated with paprika and cumin. Taktouka ($4) came as a tangle of limp grilled strips of red bell peppers, shining with olive oil. Both were bright and fresh and fun to eat when piled on the puffy, rather bland small rounds of Moroccan bread. One night, the bread was a trifle stale and served whole and cold; on another, it came to the table fresh, heated, and sliced, with a saucer of high-quality olive oil. Long cuts of carrots a la chermoula ($4) betrayed very little of the spice blend (which features garlic, cilantro, mint, paprika, turmeric, and cayenne) in its name. They tasted like lightly vinegared, very mild pickled carrots. The b stilla ($6) was good, crisp phyllo dough filled with chicken in a mixture "sweet and peppery, soft and violent," according to its over-the-top menu description. The shredded chicken was indeed sweet and soft, but we detected no violence in its gently cinnamoned mixture, flavored with onions and ground almonds. We appreciated the fact that there was only the lightest dusting of powdered sugar, unlike the snowdrifts elsewhere that turn the pie cloying.
It s with the main courses that Aicha really shines. Everything was good, and a few dishes were amazingly delicious. The tagines came to the table in small versions of the conical-topped cooking pots that give the stews their name. Lamb tagine ($9) featured meaty chunks of shank braised in a thick, sticky sauce full of melted onions and softened whole prunes, with whole toasted almonds and a sprinkling of sesame seeds; it was satisfyingly muttony. The chicken tagine ($9), two pieces of the bird with, happily, skin and bones still intact, was bright yellow from its saffron marinade and heaped with olives, but could have used a bit more of the preserved lemon its sauce only hinted at. Kefta tagine ($9) was a wonder, and one of the two dishes at Aicha we found to be not only original but also completely irresistible: tiny, highly seasoned meatballs in a savory tomato sauce with a soft-cooked egg alongside, waiting to mix its liquid yolk with the rich sauce. These dishes were hearty, highly flavored, and homey. The fish tagine ($10) suffered from its pale, rather flavorless farmed salmon, which picked up little allure from its chermoula marinade. We preferred its companions of tomatoes, red onions, and sliced potatoes, cooked alongside in a paprika broth.Five tasty, bright-red lamb merguez sausage links ($10) came with a good portion of plain rice and another heap of lightly dressed chopped romaine, strewn with crumbled feta. A frequent special of grilled lamb chops ($10) was even more generous: Four slightly flattened rib chops, cooked unfashionably medium, were served criss-crossed on another hillock of rice, garnished with red taktouka peppers.The vegetables in the vegetarian couscous scattered with garbanzos ($9) — zucchini, butternut squash, and carrots — were cooked almost to the point of mush: All of their essence had gone into their cooking liquid, reduced and served alongside in a small ramekin. It was so full of flavor that we thought a chicken-stock version had come to the table by accident. A similar miracle was wrought with the vegetarian tagine of white beans ($7), whose sauce was incredibly meaty-tasting and delicious. One night the couscous was bland and rather dry; another night, a side order ($3) was moister and fluffier, but startlingly cinnamony.
Lemon tart ($3), rice pudding ($2), and vanilla flan ($3) are listed for dessert, but when we tried to order all three one night at 8:45, we were told the tart and pudding weren t ready yet. We settled for a shared flan, strewn with nuts crushed almost to powder. It was curiously light, barely sweet, with a mouthfeel devoid of fat. When we asked our server what its ingredients were, he said, "I wish the chef would tell me!" At our second meal, the flan was again the only confection available. This time we were told that it was eggless and thickened with cornstarch, with a touch (almost undetectable) of half-and-half.
When we left that evening, we passed three guys whose table was cluttered with little plates heaped with olives, roasted peppers, mashed eggplant, and lots of the kefta meatballs, all piled in varying assortments on Moroccan bread, alongside the surprising addition of a plastic bear full of honey they were squeezing on top. It startled us a bit, but it gave us an idea for what to eat next time — along with the kefta and white-bean tagines we had to have again.
Photo by Rory McNamara
The tagine is something of a unicorn in the kingdom of food. Many people will recognize the word as referring to a stew of Moroccan or other north African provenance, but it also refers to the pot in which the stew is cooked. And, though you may be an inveterate Moroccan-restaurant-goer, chances are you ve never seen the tagine pot in its full glory. What typically reaches the table is just the lower half of the tagine — a kind of serving platter, probably of glazed ceramic, possibly hand-painted.
But the spectacular part of the tagine is the conical top, which looks like a space capsule or a hat from Beach Blanket Babylon. The top is aesthetically striking, but it also is a mechanism for moisture retention; like a still, it captures condensation and routes it back to the dish whence it came. The top has a knob at its peak that resists heat and so enables the cook to lift it up and see what s going on in there.
I wish the removal of tagine tops would become a standard tableside flourish at Moroccan restaurants, the way lighting saganaki on fire is at Greek places. Tagine de-topping isn t standard practice at Aicha, at least not yet, but I did thrill to the spectacle, deep in the open kitchen, of a bare-handed chef pulling off the top of a hand-painted ceramic tagine to inspect its contents. The tagine top looked very much like the one I have at home, and perhaps the tagine dish itself was the one that would soon be brought to me. More on this important matter anon.
Aicha
opened late in the spring in a storefront space on Polk Street, in that
transitional zone between the Civic Center and Russian Hill. The
restaurant will definitely be seen as an upgrade to this
emulsification-resistant neighborhood. Although it s small, it s
handsomely appointed — a crisp, clean spareness with striking copper
accents, and, of course, beautifully authentic tagines.
Authenticity
is a central theme at Aicha. The restaurant will do its best "to
preserve the authenticity of the cuisine," according to a statement on
the Web site. This is never an easy undertaking in California, land of
bravura salad-tossing, but so far the place is off to an impressive
start. The food is modestly priced and not elaborate or precious, but it
does offer an intensity of flavor many kitchens charging two or three
times as much might envy.
There
is great delight to be found not only among the appetizers, which cost
between $3 and $6, but even in the more modest side dishes ($3 each)
like the simple-sounding white beans. These are of the smaller,
navy-bean size; are expertly cooked al dente (i.e. neither hard nor
mushy); and are presented in a creamy, well-seasoned sauce whose glints
of redness hint at the presence of paprika or some other extroverted but
not bitingly hot red pepper. We do not eat enough beans and legumes in
this country, perhaps because we associate them with poverty and the old
country (whatever that country that might be), but maybe we would eat
more if they were this good.
For just a dollar or three more, you can find yourself feasting on comparably gratifying appetizers. Blanched carrots ($4), are peeled, quartered, and tossed with chermoula, the distinctive north African spice paste that usually includes garlic, preserved lemon, and cumin, along with other herbs and spices. Like beans, carrots (one of the notably health-protecting orange foods) are neglected in our culinary culture and are often relegated to lowly duty in mirepoix or soup stock. But if you served these at a party, you would run out in five minutes.
Possibly even tastier, though not quite as finger-friendly, is taktouka ($4), a plateful of grilled red bell pepper squiggles tossed with some tomato, olive oil, and what the menu cryptically calls "spices." Cumin was in there, certainly, but grilled peppers have such a distinctive and alluring flavor that they don t really need much else.
Somewhat less impressive — yet at the top of the appetizer price scale — was an artichoke salad ($6) consisting of pickled artichoke hearts, peppery green olives, crumblings of feta, and lots of immaculate romaine leaves.Lots. The romaine was too much with us and diluted the potency of other players.
It was thought that the b stilla ($6), a pizzetta-sized round of phyllo stuffed with pistachio chicken and dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon, was a little too cinnamony.
Aicha Opens in De Afghanan Space
A new Moroccan place called Aicha has already popped up in the Polk Street space that once housed De Afghanan Kabob House (And Mediterranean Spirit before that). Open exactly one week, they re currently doing dinner at 5:30 p.m., but said they ll soon be serving lunch, too. This seems like a nice little budget place, with prices on mains hovering in the $10 range and about $4-6 for appetizers. Check out the menu (pdf), then go get your zaalook and lamb kebabs. [Via Eater]
[photo: Via kali.ma]