Souk up the atmosphere in Dada

The premises may be pastiche, but the food is the real deal at this Moroccan restaurant, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

THERE IS SOMETHING of the Santa’s Grotto about Dada Moroccan Restaurant on Dublin’s South William Street. It has been thickly plastered in a sandy render designed to blend it into a downtown Marrakesh souk. The look is as real as a layer of cotton wool snow. On the way through the door you can tap the beaten metal that surrounds it and hear a hollow sound.

I’m prepared to suspend disbelief on the first icy night of the winter and inside it’s warm and buzzing, with comfy couches in the wine bar. They look as though they should come equipped with curly-toed slippers for lounging customers. My friend waves at me through another Arabian nights window in the upper part of the restaurant. There are lots of metal grilles, vaguely confessional-like, and large candles bathing it all in golden light.

It’s my first visit. In a phone text conversation with Paul earlier in an effort to find a venue on a busy Friday night he described it as having plenty of atmosphere. The idea has a touch of the dark arts about it in a restaurant setting. It can often be loosely translated to mean a place where you can drink buckets of wine and laugh yourself silly over dinner.

The word Dada is translated in a small menu card as women. A little more searching reveals that it means servant women, the young black Saharan and sub-Saharan women who worked as cooks in wealthy homes, often employed to prepare the daily couscous platters. A bit Downton in the sun.

The menu is simple, with plenty of Moroccan staples. Over at the kitchen hatch there are tagine lids stacked like cheerful chimney pots. My zaaluk is delicious. It comes as a warm, spicy mound of cooked aubergine with a side salad (a bit insipid, but fine) and two triangles of warm, soft pitta bread. The aubergine tastes of cumin and has a pleasant vinegar tang. It’s a reminder of how much of a sin it is to let these handsome shiny vegetables wrinkle into compost in the veg basket at home.

Paul’s prawns have been pan-fried with a pepper, garlic and cumin marinade and are also very good. I’m going with a Dada special of not-very-Moroccan-sounding glazed duck with prunes and walnut confit for my main course. The duck is good, but the sauce is verging too much on over-sugared marmalade for me and the prunes are tooth-achingly sweet. It comes on a bed of beautifully cooked carrots. A side order of couscous with olive oil cuts the sweetness nicely. Paul’s lamb tagine with apricots, walnut, almonds and cinnamon is very tasty, though a little more hogget than lamb to my taste, which makes this a sweet version of Irish stew. It’s the culinary equivalent of a street hawker saying “Dia dhuit” to you outside your hotel on a package holiday to Agadir.

For dessert, I order the Moroccan pastries, which I spotted earlier being served from a tiered cake plate. There are three kinds: a white chocolate truffle, a layered nutty pastry and a delicious coconut cookie. Paul has a ktefa which comes as a huge serving of filo pastry layered with custard. He manages half of it. We get mint tea for two, which is poured into small coloured tea glasses from a height, with roughly a metre between spout and glass. A wall of steam streams out sideways from the liquid as it drops to its target. Any attempt at repeating the high pour for refills ends in spills. You need to be standing up to do this. There’s also a little scaldy sting when I realise this tea pot for two was charged at €6.40, bringing the bill for our dinner for two with two glasses each of house wine to just over €100.

There are cheaper options and early bird deals to be had, and overall I came away happy. Santa’s grotto it may be, but Santa’s beard is the real thing. Dinner for two with wine came to €101.90.

Twitter.com/catherineeats

Dada

45 South William Street, Dublin 2, tel: 01-6170777

Music: Traditional guitar sounds the night we were there

Facilities: Downstairs and decorated to rhyme with the theme

Food provenance: None

Wheelchair access: No

Rustic Stone: Revisited

As proof that opinions aren't set in stone, I went back to Dylan McGrath's Rustic Stone recently after a friend went all dreamy describing a recent meal there. I last ate there within days of its opening and found plenty of things that just didn't work. This time it was much better. A €3.95 side dish of lemon-roasted fennel was superb. McGrath's mango chutney that comes as a side-dish to the Asian quail was delicious. The crab mayo toasts have shrunk a bit, but are still great, and a starter of crunchy salad hearts filled with a variety of chutneys and a tzatziki was lovely. Seasoning is still haphazard. Some dishes come without it and the buns on a set of glamburgers were drenched in salt. Staff were brilliant, and we sat beside the kitchen where you can catch glimpses of chefs with burned forearms and cans of sugary drinks to hand. The only fly in the ointment is the cook-it-yourself option. Beside us, someone incinerated his steak on his hot stone until the air filled with enough smoke to make us cough and splutter. Maybe steak-burners could be confined to the outside tables. The food bill for two came to €55.05.