“I’ll have what she’s having,” I told the waiter, pointing confidently to Marcie. For three days, I ordered only what Marcie ordered, and she hasn’t been wrong yet.
“Ah, all the way up until our last meal together,” Marcie chimed in. Her Cape Town accent was gentle, like a modest Australian one. She is taller than the average woman with a strong build, and a surprisingly soft voice. It is polite and genuine, like everything she says is coming from a place of honesty.
I’m not one to put my faith in other people, especially when it comes to food. I am adventurous but particular. I’ll try anything, but I prefer to read a menu, see a picture, know exactly what I am getting. In a place like Morocco, a culture completely foreign to me, this kind of planning was essential. At least I thought it would be. And then I met Marcie.
Marcie was our weekend tour guide in Marrakesh, Morocco. As a middle-aged woman solely in charge of 40 college students, she managed to be our teacher and friend, guiding us through excursions during the day and enchanting us with her stories at night. She curses frequently but unassumingly. She smokes like a chimney in the winter. And she describes the world like Emily Brontë would: steadily, poetically and deeply connected to her experiences.
“That would be the Tajine de Bœuf,” clarified the waiter. Compared to the other Moroccan men I’ve seen, he seemed out of place. He had the same dark olive skin, but his face was cleanshaven and his hair was short. He wore no turban, no robe, and spoke gently.
“Sounds amazing.”
I fell in love with Morocco through pictures on the internet. After the first one I saw, a girl surfing down the sand dunes, it immediately jumped to the top of my bucket list. It has been on my mind for a year, so when I heard of a group going to Marrakesh with a local guide, I booked it before even checking the price.
The city is a maze. It is made up of two-story high orange walls, laid out like narrow, above-ground tunnels. Understanding the routes takes weeks, so we followed Marcie everywhere like children on a field trip. Shops protrude out of the walls, with homemade clothes, dishes, and trinkets placed so close together that scanning them too quickly can cause vertigo. Where there aren’t shops, there are workshops, where people craft the very items sold next door. Everything in Marrakesh is homemade.
The undecorated city walls are lined with doors to residencies. The doors, wickets actually, have two sets. The smaller set of doors are for everyday family use. These doors are a piece of larger ones, meant for guests. It is door within a door, like something from a Dr. Seuss book with a more Harry-Potter-World semblance. In both cases, the doors are short, so visitors must duck, or bow their heads, to enter the home.
The sky-high walls are meant to curtail the heat but are also used to reinforce the cultural value of modesty. The doors could open to a closet or a mansion, and no one walking by would know.
Café Arabe, the restaurant in which I was sitting, was the same way. The exterior was a tinted cement, three stories high. An arched opening acted as a doorway, with two palm-like trees on each side. It was a nice entrance, but not fancy. One step inside revealed a dozen, movie-theatre-sized dining rooms – each with their own twist on Moroccan style. They had couches with low, round tables that could have been mistaken for foot stools. The individual pieces – pillows, curtains, and vases – all had different patterns, but worked together using sunset colors to create a symbiotic style. My table was on the third-floor balcony, with plotted plants lining the iron gates, looking over the city.
Our waiter looked to my friends, who gave their orders in a similar fashion.
“Marcie’s dish.”
“For me too.”
“Same.”
I wasn’t the only one who discovered Marcie’s superior taste. Since our first meal, all of my friends ordered her dishes too.
The first time we ate with Marcie was at Le Bougainvillier Restaurant two days earlier. The menu was written completely in Arabic, and instead of trying to translate it, we listened to Marcie describe the food. She spoke as if she was talking about her children. She knew the food. She knew who had the best chicken and where to go for steak. And she was proud of what she knew. She had years of experience to back it up.
We ordered the “tajine de keftas aux œufs de caille,” which roughly translates to meatballs with quail egg, cooked in a tajine. A tajine is a clay pot in which most Moroccan food is cooked. It looks like a pottery plate with an upside-down funnel, and the funnel is taken off when the food is served. As my waiter took off my first tajine top, the meat sizzled and popped.
The meatballs resembled loose sausage, sitting in a mud-colored sauce. And two fried quail eggs were perched in the middle. The smell was enveloping – coriander, cumin, mint, ginger, cinnamon. If the spices were colors, they would be light brown, burnt orange, and dark green swirling upward and wrapping around me. They filled my nose, my lungs, and hugged me from the inside out. The glossy sauce reflected my face, like the food was looking back at me. My loud friends turned into white noise. It was me and my tajine, and all the hallucinations. I raised my arm and blew carefully into the searing spoonful.
I took my first bite and let it sit in my mouth for longer than normal. It was bold, like something you’d eat in a loud restaurant filled with strangers. The sausage acted like a sponge, so when I pressed it against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, the sauce drizzled out. It was rich in spice, warming my chest and making my mind feel sleepy. It became clear that this was something to eat slowly.
For our second dinner, Marcie booked us under a massive tent in the Medina marketplace. The marketplace is the only part of the city without 20-foot walls closing it in. It is the size of ten football fields, right in the middle of the city. But it isn’t “open.” It is still a maze, made up of tents instead of walls. They covered nearly every visible inch of pavement, with restaurants, shops, and henna artists under each.
It was crowded and loud, like any major city. Knockoff brand vendors follow tourists shouting “lui vitton good price,” and bands play next to diners hoping to make an extra dirham. All 40 of us fit under a tent, but only with elbows in and legs crossed. The grill was two feet away from my back, and I could feel discarded scraps of food bouncing off my neck but couldn’t turn around to see.
Everyone was served the same thing: six chicken kabobs cooked three different ways. One was pale, like the chicken I was familiar with. Another was bright yellow, the color of mustard. The last was so dark that it could have been mistaken for beef. I had stuffed myself with bread and homemade almond butter that afternoon, so the sight of food made me feel sick.
A woman approached our table carrying a large bag in one hand and a baby boy in the other. Her eye circles drooped so low that they folded over, and her hair was slicked back tightly. She wasn’t old, but her skin looked old, like it had been stretched and pulled for 80 years. She held her hand out like she was asking for something, and Marcie rushed to our table.
“Are you finished eating?” She spoke more directly than usual, and I knew she was talking to me. I shuddered at the thought of saying yes, with five kebobs still on my plate.
I was in the confession box at church. “Yes, I’m sorry I just had so much for lunch and – ”
“No,” she interrupted. “Don’t apologize. I know you don’t do this at home, but here, if we don’t eat all of our food, we give it to those who are hungry. Would you be willing to participate?”
I began stuffing my extra chicken into the leftover pita bread, and the rest of my table did the same. A piece here, a skewer there, and we handed her two large pitas stuffed to the brim with chicken. She added the pitas to her bag, smiling and nodding shyly. There is no language that wouldn’t recognize the empathy in my eyes and thankfulness in hers.
Marcie probably doesn’t remember this interaction – like a thousand moments of ordinary kindness blend together. A saint doesn’t know that they’re a saint. They lead a generous life, and that generosity becomes the standard. For me, this moment was transformative. For Marcie, this was routine. And there is something particularly righteous in that.
Once the food exited Café Arabe’s kitchen, everybody knew. We stacked the bread plates and scooched our couches inward, readying ourselves for the last dinner.
“For those of you who ordered my dish,” Marcie announced loudly but softly, “that is the Tajine de Bœuf. It is made in Marrakesh only, not even in the rest of Morocco.”
Whispers filled the room.
“It takes a full day to be made. Early this morning, our lovely chefs here seasoned our beef with garlic, candied lemon, cumin and saffron. They placed it in the tajine so it could soak up all these wonderful flavors, and it cooked slowly in a hammam sauna all day. Yes, the hammam sauna,” Marcie grinned knowing this struck a chord with her audience.
A hammam sauna is essentially a wet steam room. Very wet. And earlier that day, we had all received the hammam sauna treatment. We got rubbed with mud, buckets of water dumped on us, and an oily massage. I couldn’t help but imagine my beef going through the same therapy. Getting rubbed with seasoning, massaged to tenderness, simmering in the sauna, and maybe even sipping on the same mint tea that we drank after.
“Get ready for the best meal you’ve ever had. Enjoy.”
A tajine dish was placed in front of me, exposing three large blocks of beef in a shallow, mocha- colored sauce. The aroma was faint, not as strong as my first meal, but made my mouth water like I hadn’t eaten in days. It smelled like a freshly made, old-fashioned beef stew, still sitting on grandma’s stove. I dug my fork into the piece, and with only a light graze of my knife, a sliver of meat rolled off. I placed it on my tongue first, and then closed my lips.
The beef was pure silk. After one bite, it fell apart in my mouth like a warm crème brûlée. The day-long sauna treatment relieved any stress, any toughness that the meat was carrying, so it was left velvety. The next bite was the same, and the next. Every shred of beef was better than the last. Softer. Juicier.
Saffron was the most pungent seasoning. These threads of flower stamen have the power to flavor an entire meal with only a dusting of the spice. They are earthy and savory, recognizable in most Moroccan dishes. The candied lemon punched right after the saffron – not in a sweet way, not sour, but in the most organic, sophisticated way that it could. The garlic was tangy, cumin gentle, and they all built upon each other, working better together.
If my first Moroccan meal was metaphorically brown, orange, and green, this one was bronze. Pure bronze. The kind of bronze you’d find on battle armor defending the ancient Greeks or mud at the bottom of a mineral pond. It would make up dancing squares, building and rebuilding shapes in front of me. Once eaten, they would plant themselves into my gut and grow throughout my body, following my veins as a guide. The bronze would fill me, allowing my skin the most faint but refined glow.
I looked over at Marcie. She pleasantly picked from her tajine completely unaware of her brilliance. A few days ago, I would have never ordered slabs of beef for my meal, much less allowed someone to order for me. She didn’t show off, she didn’t need to convince me, but I trusted her anyways. This natural sense of welcoming cannot be learned. It cannot be copied or taught or mastered. It is inherent in someone’s soul, in Marcie’s soul.
We were the last ones in the restaurant, and she asked, “Are you sure you know how to get back to the hostel?”
“No,” we responded. The truth is that we had no idea where we were going. We had taken many wrong turns over the days. We walked in circles, squares, asked for help, and wandered until we recognized something. “But if we get lost, we know who to call.”
Marcie looked down, smirked, and turned her ringer on.
