Dar Moha, Marrakech
A blue-walled garden, and eight red-clothed tables around a palely lit swimming pool. Couple upon couple gazing into each other’s eyes, candlelit. In the sky, scarcely a different shade of blue from the Yves Klein tone of the walls, stars fade in. Dar Moha is easily the most romantic restaurant in Marrakech – in fact, I’m hard-pushed to think of a comparably beautiful dining environment the world over. It’s made sharper by the fact that the interior of the restaurant, via which one reaches the Moha garden, is all red carpeting and brass handrails and sad empty tables, ensuring that your expectations are kept fairly low until you enter the garden.
Not everyone gets it, however. I last came here in mid-2008, with my partner, when we endured an attempt at forcible befriending from a Texan gentleman at the next table, a man twice our age, twice our waist size, and at least twice our rudeness (and we can be terribly rude). It was as my partner and I discussed an upcoming trip to Provincetown that he first made his presence known. He must have heard the “P” word; his head revolved towards us like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. “You guys been to Fort Lauderdale?” he barked – not into a conversational lull, as it happened, but never mind. We said we had not. “Shame on you! Fort Lauderdale is twice as gay as Provincetown.” There wasn’t much we could say to that, proud though the boast seemed to be. A little later it was: “You guys from London?” We halted our conversation, turned baleful eyes on him and admitted it. “Hey, you see many musicals? No? Really? Not even Billy Elliot?” No, not even Billy Elliot. Out it came again: “Shame on you!”
“Shame on you! Fort Lauderdale is twice as gay as Provincetown.” There wasn’t much we could say to that, proud though the boast seemed to be
Later, in one final, rather desperate conversational gambit, we were favoured with what he must have believed to be a subtle invitation to join him at his hotel near the airport after dinner; maybe because my partner and I were not conducting our conversation at foghorn volume, he must have thought us insufficiently interested in just one another’s company. Idly, in 2013, we wondered where he might have wound up in the world. Possibly hacked to pieces by a late-night hotel visitor inadequately vetted.
No such delights this time – the sole example of anyone not wholly in love with Dar Moha, as we again were, came from the very British body language of the couple sitting beside the musicians: she looking over at the players with polite disinterest, he with his head turned away and his hand spread over half his face in the universally-recognised gesture of “Just make it stop.” I rather enjoyed the performance: Arabic vocals sung-spoken over drifting ambient soundwashes, percussion provided by handclaps and, at times, the playing of spoons. Perfect on a balmy blue July evening.
Dar Moha, Marrakech
The Dar Moha menu lets you select main courses and desserts, but before these there is a kind of opening ceremony. First are set out on your table ten miniature tagine dishes in different colours – exactly the kind of thing enchanted diners would probably pay over the odds to take home as souvenirs, then never use – containing cold vegetarian starters and salads, from the divine (mint and cucumber salad; a red pepper custard) to the bemusing (a sort of barley cake pricked with seemingly all the left-over spices the kitchen could find). Warm starters – brik-pastry “cigars” of minced beef, little chicken pieces, fried triangular parcels of white cheese – are somehow squeezed onto your table, by no means capacious, along with breads and oils and dips. By the time you reach the end of this, the rest of the menu seems surplus to requirements. We struggled contentedly on: the omnipresent Moroccan delicacy of pigeon pastilla here strikes the right balance between meat, pastry, and not too much stodge (I’ve had pastillas elsewhere which could double as the rubber brick trainee lifeguards have to wrest from the floor of a swimming pool); a seabass tagine here proved, delightfully, to be a kind of inverted shepherd’s pie, two beautifully cooked pieces of fish atop emerald broad beans and a bed of mashed potato. A foie gras-topped couscous is perhaps the only time where Moha has sacrificed subtlety in favour of an unnecessary “luxury ingredient”, but it’s still entirely marvellous – unctuous in all the right ways.
After this, a simple plate of orange and peach sprinkled with orange-blossom water is all the dessert you need. The service is unfailingly attentive: for some reason, one table this evening seemed “cursed”; no fewer than three parties were seated there and signalled their unhappiness with it; they were smilingly guided to new place settings, or escorted out with nary a grumble – and Chef Moha himself, undertaking a little tour of tables towards the end of the night, is charmingly humble. He’s not unaware of the magic he’s woven here, though. “We think this is the most romantic restaurant in the world,” we told him, and he clasped his hands and smiled and shook his head. “The world, no!” he replied slyly. “The region, maybe.” I wonder what our Texan would have made of such modesty? C
Dar Moha, 81 rue Dar el Bacha, Marrakech, Morocco
+212-5243 86400; darmoha.ma