Mzouda, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

More hurry, less flavour

Review published on 17/07/2006 © Sunday Herald

For the non-chef, restaurant food is something of a mystery. How on earth, we wonder, do they manage to whisk up dishes in just a few minutes that would take a couple of hours to cook at home?

Some of the answers you really don’t want to know. Like the chef made it several days before and reheated it. Or microwaved it from frozen.

For the most part, restaurants prefer the ease of menus with dishes that can be broken down into separate elements and cooked to order. Slow-cooked dishes are problematic for the typical restaurant kitchen with an undependable turnover of tables.

If the chef makes such dishes in a scaled-up version of home cooking, he must cross his fingers and pray that enough diners choose them before they become too old. It’s easier to go for the less risky option of pre-cooking a sauce or gravy and then adding it to lumps of meat that have been cooked in some sort of neutral manner beforehand, or simply fried at the last moment.

But the whole point of patiently cooked meat dishes, be it navarin of lamb, Irish stew or roghan josh, is that the raw flesh is transformed and made more interesting as it absorbs the rich flavours. And the classic Moroccan tagine, where meat is combined with salty items like olives and pickled lemons, along with sweet ingredients such as dried fruits, then gently cooked for hours in a clay pot, should surely be the ultimate showcase for the pleasures of slow cooking.

So you will understand my disappointment with Mzouda, a relatively new Moroccan-Spanish restaurant in Glasgow, when the cubes of meat in my tagine of beef tasted as though they had only a passing acquaintance with the liquid that coated them. Neither component had much character.

Indeed, tasting this tagine blind, it would have been hard to identify the key ingredients in the gravy, save that they were slightly gloopy and sweet. Much the same could be said for the house speciality, Mzouda lamb, except that it was more unpleasant than bland and anonymous because the lamb tasted old.

These dishes came with a doll’s house-sized portion of mushy rice that looked as though it had been boiled up with peppers. We had ordered a side dish of Mzouda rice, intrigued by its description as an ‘old recipe from the village’. It turned out to be pile of steamed rice, dusted with cinnamon and golden granulated sugar. I do remember scraping the customary icing sugar off my chicken and almond ‘pastilla’ pastry in Marrakesh. It may well be traditional, but eating sugared rice along with a sweet meaty dish just doesn’t do it for me.

Had I eaten only the starters and desserts, my impression of Mzouda would have been better. We got off to a good start with hot griddled wholemeal flatbread with cumin seeds. This delight came with cardboardy-textured, tinny-tasting, pre-stoned olives, wisely tarted up in a seriously hot chilli oil. Some fresh, earthy, green lentils, slow-cooked with Moroccan spices came in yet another dolly’s tea party portion, as did a perfectly acceptable but rather bland dish of aubergine cooked with tomatoes.

I kicked myself for also choosing the warm Spanish goat cheese salad with black olive dressing which was little more than a lump of workaday ‘buche’, or rinded goat’s log with a few microscopic drizzles of oddly bland, pulverised black olives, on a nondescript salad. Of the desserts, a grainy chocolate mousse was reasonable and an eggy crema Catalana with lemon zest provided a fresh, gutsy counterpoint to the lacklustre main courses.

Mzouda has been kitted out tastefully in a mellow Moorish mood. It feels comfortable, and the waiters are attentive, but when we visited, on a Friday night, they had little to do since only three tables were occupied. A rethink is surely needed if more diners are to be enticed over the threshold.

© Sunday Herald