Tunisian cuisine includes wonderful mussels, chicken tagine
Mark Laba
Province
From left: Chico Pavon, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Draoui and Zouheir ‘Zico’ Draoui of Carthage Café present chicken tagine (left) and Carthage brochette. Photograph by : Arlen Redekop, The Province
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day but it probably took the Romans only half that time to completely sack a city. Well, it took a little longer when it came to Carthage but they finally got it on the third try. And now, lo and behold, a Carthage Café has opened in the middle of Little Italy. Talk about irony.
Paid a visit with my old psychoanalyst, Dr. Zongo, who was relating to me his new theory of psychoanalysis through his patients’ approach to corn on the cob and their biting patterns while stripping corn niblets.
“How much they leave, how much they don’t, are they meticulous, are they sloppy — I’m telling you, this new theory is going to make Freud look like a hayseed from Saskatchewan.”
for couscous?” I ventured.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to keep my eye on you over dinner. You’re already a borderline case ,so I may be able to find a correlation between your couscous consumption and your unbalanced state of mind.”
We settled into a room that radiates warmth and evokes an exotic setting, befitting a restaurant that specializes in Tunisian cuisine. Wood furnishings have an ancient quality, heavy red drapes over leaded windows and smatterings of tiling conjure up night-at-the-casbah imagery and various tchotchkes of North African origin, both brass and clay, flicked by the shadow-play of candles, all work upon the brain to ready it for the edible journey.
To test the waters we began with an appetizer of Doigt de Fatima ($7.50) or “the fingers of Fatima.” A classic Tunisian starter, named for the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter whose hand wards off evil, these spring-roll pastry tubes filled with cheese, beans, tuna and eggs were very tasty and the accompanying salad of diced tomato, cucumber and onion bedded down on butter lettuce was refreshing and had a bit of zip from the herbal dressing. I’m not sure if spring-roll dough is the classic way to prepare Fatima‘s digits but a little improvisation is not a bad thing.
From there on, it’s mostly variations on couscous, except for the wonderful mussels with three sauce options and a few other seafood dishes. If you try the mussels I highly recommend the cumin, spicy harrisa, white wine and olive-oil broth.
I laid siege to the Couscous Carthage ($18.25), a daunting citadel of steamed couscous, merguez sausage, braised-lamb shank and chicken with big hunks of veggies like zucchini, potatoes, peppers and carrots, the whole shlimazel finished with a light touch of tomato sauce. The merguez was particularly inspiring and the chicken was delicious but I felt the lamb could’ve been more tender. Dr. Zongo tore into his lamb-shank couscous with the abandon of a Roman legionnaire sacking a city and had no reservations about the lamb texture.
On a non-couscous note, try the chicken tagine with saffron sauce or the steak frites and start with a classic French onion soup or Coquilles St. Jaques. For dessert try the rosewater baklava or the tart of the day.
“So, what can you tell about me from my couscous remnants?” I asked Dr. Zongo.
“You’re disorganized, bipolar and you’d better floss your teeth.”
REVIEW
Carthage Café
Where: 1851 Commercial Dr., Vancouver
Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-215-0661
Drinks: Liquor license is in the works
Hours: Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Sun., 4 -11 p.m., closed Mon.
© The Vancouver Province 2007
