Eeating and meeting in the Rif > Food > Barbecue

Barbecue

Many restaurants have charcoal barbecues. Many butchers also have charcoal barbecues outside. There are also many street vendors who have a small charcoal barbecue and a trolley with a selection of meat. You can often see the pillar of smoke from the restaurant long before you see the barbecue.

This is common on Moroccan barbecues:

The liver is usually mixed with fat; apparently, it tastes better that way. Chicken fillet is usually available both with and without marinade.

By the sea, it is common to grill fresh fish. Even restaurants that don’t specialise in meat may serve prawns and squid.

You can choose whichever combination you like to put on the barbecue. The meat is usually seasoned with salt and cumin. I’ll ask for lightly salted meat without cumin. You’ll probably be asked if you’d like Har on your meat, i.e. chilli powder.

In restaurants, it’s common to have chips and a small salad with the meat. If it’s a barbecue outside a butcher’s or a simple street barbecue, you’ll get the meat in a bun.

Vegetables

Grilled vegetables in The Rif are not nearly as common as meat and fish. In some places, you can get grilled onions and tomatoes. But in simpler establishments, meat is usually the only option.

I’m not a vegetarian, but I think food without vegetables is a bit dull. When there are vendors nearby selling fresh, colourful vegetables, it’s strange that they don’t end up on the barbecue. But that is a problem that is easy to solve.

At a barbecue outside a butcher’s in Taza, I sometimes brought a tomato with me and asked for it to be grilled. That was no problem. But the grill master wasn’t used to mixing meat and vegetables on the grill. I noticed the chicken was raw inside. But even that was easy to sort out; I pointed out the problem and he grilled the food for a bit longer.

Chicken rotisserie

Another type of grill is the chicken rotisserie. These devices are usually located outside the restaurant. They look like a glass cabinet and inside there are horizontal rotating skewers with whole chickens. At some of these places, I’ve eaten very good chicken – juicy and perfectly seasoned. A quarter of a chicken has been more than enough to fill me up. At just as many places, I’ve been disappointed; the chicken has been dry and tasteless and hasn’t seemed to be of good quality.