El Bahia

The poet Milton wrote “They also serve who only stand and wait”. Well, John boy, can you hear me up there on your Commonwealth cloud? I’ve got news for you and the news is “they don’t”, at least not in wildest Wicklow Street. At El Bahia last Saturday night there was plenty of standing, mostly of the ‘around’ variety, by restaurant staff. There was a fair bit of waiting – for starters, 55 minutes for a starter. But there was precious little serving done during the three hours ten it took Daughter Two and myself to secure and ingest two courses and coffee.

Every restaurant has a night when things turn tits-up. The gas conks out, two sous chefs go awol, a commis flambées himself, a waitress at the pass suddenly hollers “Get me a midwife!” Been there, done that, mopped up with the t-shirt and so has Daughter Two until she got a vocation to stop Britain’s NHS from killing Mancunians and switched careers. As she said, she learned as far back as first year in catering college that you don’t just hang around and do sweet fa while starving diners get cannibalistic hallucinations. Here, an apology, an explanation, a plate of pita bread, a bowl of hummus, maybe a complimentary glass of house wine would have gone a long way towards turning a ‘pear-shaped’ into a positive.

El Bahia is Dublin’s oldest Moroccan Restaurant. The newest, Dada, is a few hundred yards away, in South William Street. We stuck our heads in there earlier, only to be greeted by the ghoulish wailing and high decibel clanging together of metal objects that is Moroccan muzak. Not exactly the ideal ambience for father-daughter bonding, we decided and retreated. El Bahia was our second choice. Ten minutes after we arrived the place was heaving. This may have had something to do with the chaos in the kitchen or other factors might have been at play. I didn’t have my crystal ball with me.

We ordered starters, D2 the spiced prawns, me the sardines. “Sardines A or Sardines B?” queried the waitress, “One is grilled, the other, fried.” “Which do you recommend?” I ventured. “Well, my name is Bea, so have B”. Almost an hour later, sardines B arrived, two of them, so cooked to mush I felt like asking for a straw. How I wished her name were Alice. Daughter Two’s brace of butterflied prawns were flavourless and rubbery, again a sure sign of overcooking. The limp and straggly salad accompaniment looked as though it had died of boredom from hanging around on the plate waiting for the prawns to become cartilaginous. We drank a Moroccan shiraz recommended by the waitress; it has a big ‘S’ on the label in case you are perversely determined to dine here, despite this review. This wine, sere and seriously alcoholic, will fuel your masochistic tendencies a treat.

Then followed another thirty-odd minutes’ delay which we spent drumming our forks to the tin can accompaniment, albeit quieter than Dada’s. I do wish restaurateurs could grow out of this pathetic habit of equating muzak with ‘atmosphere’. The most sympathetic atmosphere is the buzz of conversation emanating from happy diners. It turned out we had both ordered tagines, though the word didn’t appear next to either item on the menu. Tagines are slow-cooked stews braised at low temperature, resulting in fork-tender meat with aromatic vegetables and sauce, cooked in the pot of the same name. Most involve slow simmering of less-expensive cuts of meat, combined with a medley of ingredients – olives, quinces, pears, apricots, raisins, prunes, figs dates and nuts are common, as are fresh or preserved lemons – seasoning and spices. I took the Lissan – cow’s tongue, while D2 did Elham Barcoq, lamb with prune and sweet cinnamon. A youth arrived at table with both and, after asking “Are you ready?” lifted the lids of each simultaneously, mimicking silver service. Though mains were better by far than the starters, we were only half happy. In mine, the spices were discordantly unharmonious. D2′s lamb dish was, in her own words “very ordinary indeed”. We both sensed a lack of ‘wow!’ factor. Shouldn’t Moroccan cooking have a waft of the exotic and mysterious? El Bahia’s tagines seemed mundane, play-safe; dare I say it, ‘Delia-ised’.

We passed on dessert, not wishing to be there till the small hours. By now the waitress had sensed that all was not well at this family reunion. She pressed a Moroccan coffee on us. I assented, imagining it to be a North African version of Greek coffee or Türk kahvesi made fresh, sticky and flavoursome in the traditional ibrik but no, this was either stale pour-over or washed-out espresso to which, I’d venture, a spoonful of raw spices and a slug of some equally raw hooch had been added, tripling the ‘Yech’ factor. Rapid arrival apart, this ‘coffee’ stood as a metaphor for the whole wasted evening.

The damage:  €79.50 for 2 x starters, 2 x mains, 1 coffee, 1 bottle wine

Verdict: They stand; we wait; eventually, they serve.

Moral: If things go pear-shaped, cuddle the customer.

Rating: *1/2

El Bahia, 37, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2, Tel: 01 677 0213