Baraka Review

Baraka, the supposedly French-Mediterranean restaurant, was only decent. It's in a cute though very tight space in Portero Hill. (They had to pull out the table to let us squeeze in.) We shared three small dishes and one large one:

• Stuffed dates. Nothing special. I had some hopes for this because it was supposedly stuffed with, among other things, chorizo (spicy italian sausage). But really the stuffing was mild and the taste was dominated by the date flavor, which we didn't appreciate.

• Pistachio-crusted goat cheese with onion jam and honey. This was so amazingly astonishingly sweet that we couldn't finish it. Just too much sweetness from the honey. Spreading the onion jam on bread (when we could get pieces of onion that weren't so overly coated with the honey) was excellent. The goat cheese itself on bread was excellent too (though slightly less excellent than the onion jam). And a little bit of honey on bread is good too. But the whole dish together was just too honey coated to be too very pleasant. (Even given the work required to de-honey some ingredients to put on bread, this was still the best dish of the evening.) The components of the dish were great; if I happen here again I'd just ask for "no honey" and be confident it'll be the best dish of the meal.

• Moroccan-style meatballs. Somewhat dense. These had a spicy and quite nice flavor -I think they were lamb meatballs- but yogurt sauce they were served with didn't anything to the dish.

• Chicken tagine. I always though tagine was almost a stew-like item poured over couscous. But this was basically just a roasted chicken (leg and thigh if I remember correctly) served with very little liquid. A little more liquid to better flavor the couscous would certainly have been appreciated; we ran out of liquid. Not bad but nothing special.

Original Announcement

After a brief hiatus, this *Wednesday* (i.e., tomorrow) at 8:00pm we'll go to Baraka, a Spanish-Moroccan restaurant in Portero Hill.

http://www.barakasf.net/

Please tell me if you are coming!

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