souq
Sometimes eating out is a bit like visiting a foreign land. You hope to find a inside track restaurant, one that’s authentic, for the locals, not a tourist trap. You sift through the recommendations from guidebooks, the hotel receptionist, web sites. Sometimes you find one that fits the bill and get the sense of satisfaction to be had from scraping below the skin of a culture. Other times you lose and realise that you’ve fallen for a tourist trap. Creeping disappointment mounts but even though you now see that the place is clichéd, not cheap, and second rate, it’s too late to walk out.
Walking into the new Souq in Edinburgh I’m not sure which type of experience we’re going to have. They haven’t stinted on the decor here, which is Marrakesh bazaar, walls painted in the baked earth tones of the Atlas Mountains, a host of characteristic coloured glass lights. They’re also selling ceramics, woven baskets, scarfs, cushion covers, all the typical stuff tourists bring back from Morocco. The premises are ambitiously big, with a capacious basement for parties, yet when we arrive, admittedly on a Tuesday night, only one other table is occupied apart from ours. Perhaps we should have come on a Saturday when they do belly dancing here. On second thoughts, maybe not.
Front of house staff do what they always do when underemployed: chat to each other. Like a tourist restaurant where staff are bored rigid waiting for the next party of hapless tourists to be funnelled their way by some guide who takes a backhander for the service, a kitchen where the gas is only lit when a customer walks in, Souq is slow to crank into action. Mint tea is eventually served in an ornate teapot that barely fills three pretty, but very small coloured glasses. Stewed and bitter, it’s fit for a Stalinist era Russian cafeteria. Later when I examine the bill in one of those lacrimose ‘how did it mount up to that’ exercises I notice that we’ve been charged £8.85 for the privilege. If I were a tourist I’d think I’d been stung.
Filling Harissa chickpea soup, sharp with lemon, mildly spicy, with a pleasing, not overly blended texture from pulses, potatoes, tomato, is in retrospect easily the best thing savoury item in our meal, which overall tastes as if the chef has been told that Scots like fried food and are not very fond of greens. You’d find more herbs in one measly supermarket packet of herbs than in our entire dinner.
Sweetly soggy cauliflower florets in greasy batter, seriously unappealing in themselves, are made worse by their ‘whipped feta’ accompaniment, a cloying, peppery, greyish emulsion. Solid falafels suffer from the lack of herb problem and timid spicing. Kubba, described as ‘delicious patties of mixed vegetables’ are another deep-fried stomach-sinker, two of them, sat sternly on a plate without anything fresh to leaven their solidity. Fattoush is a multi-flop: cotton wool tomatoes, the usual watery cucumber, cheap pre-stoned olives, a straight-from-the-fridge, herb-free zone where arid baguette replaces the customary flat bread. ‘Egyptian-style stuffed cabbage’, the leaves sour enough to make sauerkraut, filled with dry rice, possible of the pre-boiled sort, that tastes as though it’s been mixed with off-the-shelf stuffing mixture, puts me in mind of Batchelor’s rice. Borek- deep-fried, chewy, filled with stringy mozzarella- is an offence against Turkish cookery. Likewise fatayer is an insult to Lebanon, a sad, saggy pizza more like, with elastic mozzarella, barely a speckle of the promised za’atar, served with yogurt, a crude red sauce that tastes of old garlic and powdered chilli.
More diners have straggled in, so perhaps the staff is overwhelmed now: we have to two waitresses to clear and wipe the table. Three cheers for the saffron and cardamom ice cream. Atypically, it’s rather good, unlike the baklava, which is of the dry, gluey type you’d get in an airport duty free shop. This wasn’t the sort the sort of foreign eating experience I had in mind. It’s a relief to be heading home.
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