Marrakech Cafe sweetens up a cursed location

This says volumes about the way geography is taught in the United States: I took five people with me — on different nights — to the Marrakech Café in Westport, and none of them knew exactly where Morocco was located. Two of them insisted that it was near India and Pakistan. One of my dining companions asked the restaurant’s owner, Noure Kamal, if the country shared a border with France.

It does not, of course. Morocco is on the African continent, with coastlines facing both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. France did occupy the country from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s, and both it and Spain influenced Morocco’s culinary culture. That’s evident by the kinds of dishes served at the eight-month-old Marrakech Café: gratin casseroles and spicy sausages and an occasional dinner special that Kamal (who runs the restaurant with his brother, Amine) wants Kansas Citians to love: a festive pastry called bastilla, a dish traditionally prepared with pigeons.

The locals here aren’t so keen on pigeon pie, so Kamal’s crusted creation is made with chicken and vegetables and baked with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar. But for the American palate, it’s too sweet to enjoy as an entrée and not quite sweet enough for a dessert.

Kamal is determined to show this town that Moroccan cuisine is strongly influenced by Mediterranean cooking traditions, but he doesn’t serve hummus or pita or, God forbid, gyro sandwiches. Bread is an important component of his menu, but instead of the unleavened pita found in local Arabic restaurants, Kamal offers baskets of khobz, a yeastier, puffier counterpart that’s perfect for soaking up the sauces in his flavorful tajines. “I don’t serve rice with my tajines,” he says. “That’s not how we eat them in Morocco.”

And in the Marrakech Café, it’s easy to give in to the romance of a country that has inspired great poets and several classic American movies: Morocco with Marlene Dietrich, Tangier with Maria Montez and Sabu, and Casablanca. The Kamal brothers hired local artist Katie Carter to paint Byzantine-style murals in the dining room. And in a nod to Continental dining customs of another age, they’ve set the tables with crisp linens and fresh roses in glass vases.

The most dramatic change to this storefront space — it was once Tivoli Video before becoming a series of failed restaurants — has been in regard to the aromatic curse from the shop next door. The fragrance of acrid mothballs wafting from the Aladdin Oriental Rug Gallery effectively drove customers away from the previous tenant, Taqueria Bautista. Noure Kamal has led a virtual jihad against the stink, including different venting, air purifiers, and a proposed lease agreement to soon take over part of the carpet shop in order to build out a small retail space to sell Moroccan gift items.

Now that I’ve dined in the Marrakech Café a few times, I can report that there’s still a pungent whiff of camphor at the entrance, but it’s easily forgotten once you’re actually seated in the brown and gold dining room. I’d still request a table closer to the kitchen, where the aroma of cooking spices is much more alluring.

And it’s those seductive spices — cilantro, mint, garlic, cinnamon, cumin — that make this extraordinary cuisine so distinctive. Noure Kamal, who is both manager and chef, uses a delicate hand when seasoning his dishes, but you’ve never tasted beef quite as succulent and sensually seasoned as his fragrant tajine: slow-simmered for hours in saffron butter, onion, ginger, cinnamon and garlic with prunes and apricots. It’s one of the most satisfying beef dishes I’ve had in a long time. A traditional Moroccan stew, served in a domed clay pot, is prepared differently, depending on the meat. The chicken tajine here is simmered in saffron, olive oil, ginger and house-pickled lemon.

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The soft, tart lemon adds a fresh note to another slow-simmered meat: a lamb shank that all but falls off the bone and into its bed of vivid yellow saffron rice. That was on the night I wisely saved my salad to eat with my meal rather than before it — the textures, colors and flavors of the two dishes complemented each other well. The salad was a heap of garnet-colored pickled beets, marinated in a simple cilantro-and-parsley vinaigrette, and topped with a dollop of caper mayonnaise.

Simplicity, Noure Kamal says, is the key to his cooking: “We use many spices and herbs, but nothing here is over the top.”

A salad of sliced cucumbers and chopped tomatoes is doused in a remarkably fresh dressing of olive oil, white-wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and a hint of cilantro. It was a soothing first act to a spicier dish: the house-made merguez, a plump lamb-and-beef sausage seasoned with cumin, parsley, garlic, cilantro, and a dash of chili pepper. On that particular visit, I had it with a mound of couscous. It’s actually better with french fries — fried spuds are glorious in any culture.

I wish I had ordered up a mess of fries with the Marrakech sampler. This restaurant’s starter platter boasts small mounds of three excellent vegetarian creations and a couple of grilled-chicken skewers. The zaalouk is a variation on the tapenade theme: a pan-fried eggplant paste that’s deliciously garlicky. Another veg-friendly starter is a jumble of sliced carrots cooked up with Spanish paprika and cumin and doused in a spicy sharmoula sauce.

The Marrakech Café menu isn’t rich in meatless dishes, but there is a couscous creation with pretty but slightly mushy hunks of butternut squash, zucchini, cabbage, onion, carrots, turnip, and a whole lot of chickpeas.

I don’t pretend to be an authority on anything Moroccan (I’m one of those people who thought the 1969 Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Marrakech Express” was about, you know, a train), so I peppered Noure Kamal with questions, which he patiently answered. (If you ask Amine Kamal the same questions, you’ll get different answers. But because Noure actually cooks the food, I have more faith in his responses.) One example is the tradition of heavily sweetened coffee and tea. The Kamals bring out complimentary servings — in stylish gold and blue glasses — of sweet mint tea made with fresh tea leaves. “Don’t you ever serve unsweetened tea?” I asked him. He looked appalled by the very idea.

“That’s not the way it’s done,” he said, “in Morocco.”

I’m guessing that two of the sweets on Kamal’s limited dessert menu, a wedge of commercially baked tiramisu and key lime pie (both from Restaurant Depot), aren’t how pastries are done in Morocco, but the locals like them. Far better is a slab of baklava, maybe the biggest piece of the flaky phyllo-and-nut confection served in Kansas City. It’s buttery and honeyed, with a thick layer of chopped walnuts, pistachios and almonds, and it’s large enough for three people to share comfortably. It’s baked here in town, by a friend of the Kamals’, and it’s reputed to be delicious with mint tea.

I had my baklava without a hot beverage, though. There’s a limit to my tolerance for refined sugar in anything. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” said my friend Bob, happily spearing a forkful of baklava into a spritz of whipped cream — the kind that comes in an aerosol can — and taking a slug of the fragrant brewed tea. “This is the way you’re supposed to be eating baklava.”

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Yes, I know: the way they do it at Marrakech.