#15 Babouch
Posted on April 6, 2007
Filed Under Moroccan | Leave a Comment
Tonight, a Moroccan meal at Babouch!
This is a real special treat, and it’s not just a meal, it’s more like a 3 hour dinner and show and cultural experience all rolled up into one. Moroccan food has some intense and fascinating uses of spices. There’s Paprika, cumin, and even lamb cooked with honey. It’s quite a departure for me.
There’s lots of pictures from this meal, so let’s hop right to it.
Babouch is on Gaffey Street in San Pedro. It looks so unremarkable from the outside, but the inside is beautifully decorated and comfortably furnished. It feels like you’re in a big tent, sitting on plush sofas with pillows.
The beautiful gold and blue room. (Go Bruins?)
A beautiful light hanging over my sofa.
First things first. You eat with your hands in Morocco, so you gotta have clean hands. They carry out this big ornate pot, plop it on your table with a kettle and you wash your hands over it. They give you big towels to use as napkins and also for you to wipe your hands. This is my manager Dan and my coworker, Ms. Joy Kitzmiller.
The meal begins with the brochette, which you scoop up with pieces of bread. Finger licking good. The towel is real handy already.
The second course is the Bastilla. A pastry appetizer, it’s got flaky skin baked over ground meat and doused with powdered sugar. I had a hard time with this as I tend to literally inhale the sugar…
Oh, and it’s not just food, it’s a SHOW, too! Our belly dancer for the evening came out and performed. According to witnesses, I couldn’t move my hips like her.
The main courses came after the belly dance performance, this is the lamb skewers. Delicious, strong lamb flavor enhanced with cumin.
No, THUMPER! This is rabbit meat. It’s not bad but I felt the slightest twinge of guilt. It’s covered with garlic and paprika sauce. Actually, the sauces for all these dishes were all really good and required a lot of bread to soak it up.
Oh, comfort food! This is the couscous and it had a nice texture and was a great buffer for all the different flavors of food we had.
This, the lamb with honey and roasted almonds, was the star of the night for me. Amazingly well executed with the honey offsetting the heavier flavor of lamb, what a great way to make lamb, I was totally hooked, I’d come back just for this dish. And I had to have more bread to soak up the honey sauce. My low carb diet was out the door for the night.
Here we have the Mint tea. The waiter pours it from high above the table while Joy watches. Joy is actually kind of a celebrity, she was an US champion badminton player and represented the US in the 1992 Olympics. She still plays and coaches.
Lastly, we finish the meal with this moroccan pastry. This was light, crunchy and sweet.
Wow, what an experience this was. A tremendous exotic meal with great spices and unexpected ways of preparing all sorts of meats, tea and desserts and even belly dancing! All of this was $25 a person, and Babouch had a coupon for a party of at least 4, so this was actually not a very expensive meal. Bring 3 friends for an special occasion, and don’t forget a couple of dollar bills for the belly dancer. (Yes, it’s what you’re thinking…)
Babouch
810 South Gaffey Street
San Pedro, California
(310) 831-0246
Tuesday through Sunday, 5 to 10 P.M.
Call and leave a message on the answering machine for reservations.