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At Souk in the City, Nick Dent can’t help but wonder: is Moroccan food the new black?
We were in Sydney to promote the Sex and the City movie and looking for somewhere to eat. Something about the name Souk in the City rang a bell for us, so my friends Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda and I sashayed over to the St Margaret’s complex to rest our be-Blahniked feet after a hard day raiding the boutiques of Paddington.
A souk is an Arab marketplace where you have to do a lot of bargaining, kind of like when you’re at Nobu and trying to bribe the maitre d’ to give you a table with a view of the hot bus boys. There were no hot bus boys on view at Souk, unless you count the guy near the bar throwing cutlery loudly into a drawer, but we didn’t have to bargain to get a good table in the centre of the large, elevated dining room.
I ordered Souk’s equivalent of a cosmopolitan, a Moroccan Spice Sticky ($15). “Sounds fabulous,” drawled Samantha. (She was referring to semen, you see, which is also sticky.) This well-made cocktail had cointreau, vodka, lime, mint leaves and spices – I thought I could taste cinnamon, paprika and ginger – and it set the mood for Omar Majdi’s North African stylings.
A mezze platter of dips ($16.90) was a good starter, but we ran out of toasted Turkish bread fast and an extra basket seemed to take a long while to arrive. Another entrée, magreb merguez ($15.90), was a sweet stew of chickpeas, peppers and pickled lemon containing four spicy sausages about the size of my index finger. “It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it,” said Charlotte, looking on the bright side as usual. I found my sausage a bit spongey, but the stew was flavoursome.
Samantha’s doukala (steamed lamb) couscous ($24.90) came with big chunks of pumpkin and other seasonal vegetables. Traditional it might be, I found it clunky and unappealing. But Samantha seemed to like it. “I’ve put a lot worse things in my mouth, I can tell you,” she said. (She was talking about fellatio.)
Nor did I care much for my roast duck ($32.90). The meat seemed quite dry to me and I thought the orange blossom jus was a tad sickly.
Things improved greatly with the arrival of the tajines in their traditional tall clay cooking pots. Miranda’s lamb tajine ($28.90) was a delicious sizzling shank, slow cooked with saffron, honey and cinnamon, with a boiled egg sliced in half thrown in for good measure. The honey made for another quite sweet dish, but without overpowering the lamb.
Charlotte’s corn-fed chicken tajine ($26.90) was on the money too. Tender flesh came away from the bone in a savoury olive-based sauce, with slivers of preserved lemon adding a nice shiver on the tongue.
The citrus flavours of Moroccan cuisine quite surprised us. Which got me to thinking: is Souk in the City the new Sex and the City? After all, like our Emmy award-winning show, on the surface it promised a lot of spice, but underneath it all was surprisingly sweet.
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