My first encounter with a real Moroccan tagine was 30 years ago at the house of a taxi driver who had invited me to dinner with his family in Fes.
We sat in a circle on the floor around a chicken his mother had simmered with onions, as the scent of cinnamon and saffron filled the small room. She fished out what looked like the bent piece of drainpipe found under a sink and placed it on my plate with the proud smile of a host offering a guest the most wanted serving. It was the whole neck of the chicken. My polite smile became real after I started pulling the tender strands of dark meat from the bones and ate them with shredded bits of whole-wheat khobz, a low-rising bread perfect for sipping the juices of a tagine.
In the two weeks I traveled through Morocco, I never had anything better than that chicken neck, though it was matched a few nights later by a lamb and quince tagine cooked by the same woman. Neither tagine, however, was prepared in a true tagine, the two-part clay vessel that shares its name with the fragrant stews that are the main product. If my hosts had one, I never saw it. When tagine was on the menu, it was made in a wide aluminum pan.
Since then I don’t care what my tajines are cooked in. I appreciate the look of the traditional ceramic vessels, whether their lids are shaped like inverted funnels, strict and geometric, or shaped in the more modern style, long with sloping walls that make them look like cooling towers from a nuclear power plant. I’m more interested in what’s underneath, the fruit and flesh and the harmonies of spices that pass into the steam that swells as the lids are lifted.
So it didn’t really bother me when I started to suspect that the tajines at Dar Yemma, a bright, shiny new Moroccan restaurant in Queens, aren’t cooked, if at all, in the glazed clay pots they’re served in. For example, the sesame seeds and toasted almonds sprinkled over the lamb shank tagine were clearly last-minute additions. I also wondered about the rosewater-scented plums and dried apricots surrounding the lamb. With rose water, a few extra drops can take a dish from charming to bossy. This fruit bore just enough perfume to be noticed, without spilling over into the lamb or its rich sauce. These little touches and others made this a tagine that captured the tantalizing nuance of Moroccan cuisine in ways rarely seen in New York.
Dar Yemma opened in February on the North African Business Strip on Steinway Street in Astoria. Although the area is often referred to as Lesser Egypt, a strong competing claim can be made to call it Lesser Morocco. This happens to be the name of another Moroccan restaurant nearby that is near a Moroccan travel agency, which is close to a Moroccan sandwich shop, near a Moroccan supermarket where you can buy a painted and glazed ceramic tagine.
The menu at Dar Yemma goes on for a while. One page is given to appetizers wrapped in papery layers of filo dough. There is a teacup sized bastila filled with chopped almonds and dry chicken. Better than that are the flaky, cigar-shaped briouates; one is filled with fresh cheese and coriander, the other with lightly spiced lamb and vermicelli, giving the filling a cheerful little bounce that plays well against the fragile sheets of filo dough.
But long passages of the menu can be ignored. The best of the salads is obviously zalouk, a bunch of aubergines cooked with tomatoes and red peppers in olive oil until they surrender. The zalouk is a very good dip for torn pieces of khobz; it’s even good with what should probably be French bread, but which will come across as a sliced hero sandwich to most New Yorkers.
The cucumber tomato salad needs more spices and lemon juice. I don’t know of anything that would fix the awful carrot and beet salads.
There is not much joy in the watery and unconvincing harira. Off the grill, the chewy beef kebabs and the crumbly, purplish, almost tasteless merguez can be left alone.
Dar Yemma is a tagine specialist, whether the menu knows it or not. Some of the other offerings can be haphazard, but the tagines are great.
There’s chicken with green olives and candied lemons, that classic of the tagine repertoire. The olives are more acidic than the lemons, which have a more floral than fruity scent.
Fatty, pink shrimp arrive in a bright red tomato sauce that is very lightly spiced apart from fresh cilantro. For cubes of beef liver, the kitchen makes a very different tomato sauce, a thick dark gravy with the funk of offal. The herbs in it are so tightly integrated that you can only guess at their identities. Cinnamon? Paprika? Not everyone likes liver cooked this thoroughly, but when the liver gets firm and chewy, this is the right kind of sauce for it.
The ingredients at Dar Yemma are halal and the restaurant seems to attract Muslim New Yorkers from countries outside Morocco, giving it a cosmopolitan atmosphere. (The owner, Saber Bouteraa, is from Algeria.) There are framed mirrors on the walls and an intricate arrangement of colored lights, recessed into the ceiling, that looks like it belongs in a small disco; it always seems to be about to break into a laser show that pulses to the beat of the music. A video screen on the back wall sometimes shows karaoke videos and sometimes shows a Moroccan tourism roll: the snake charmers of Jemaa el-Fnaa, the blue-washed alleys of Chefchaouen, leather sandals, sand.
The pastry display case in the windshield can be loaded with European-style desserts such as tiramis and chocolate cake, or with baklava, almond cigars and other Moroccan sweets. On the other hand, it can be empty. Anyway, there’s an argument to end up with hot mint tea, and another argument, a more convincing one, I think, to order mint tea right at the start and drink it through the night.