Here’s Looking at You, Port de Peche

Restaurant du Port de Peche, Port de Peche, Casablanca. Telephone: 31.85.61. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$50.

“All my traveling,” Ford Madox Ford once wrote, “has always been one long planning to return. One should skim through a place and if one likes it establish little contacts, with a waiter, a marketwoman, an honest merchant, an eating-place, or merely those contacts that are part of memory. Then, when one returns to stay a little, one has already made some sort of preparation for digging in.”

The first time I dined at the Restaurant du Port de Peche in Casablanca, that legendary seaport on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, these words (or at least some approximation of them) came back to me. I knew that business would bring me to Casablanca again in the months to come, and I knew that this, above all, was an eating place with which I wanted to establish “little contacts.” I also knew that when I did return to the Port de Peche, “digging in” would be exactly what I’d want to do.

Morocco is famous for its seafood, and Casablanca is famous for its seafood restaurants. The best known of these, along the Boulevard de la Corniche near the lighthouse of El Hank, invariably have French names--La Mer, Le Cabestan, Ma Bretagne, Au Petit Rocher, etc.--and serve fish and shellfish in the French manner, to diners who are themselves either French or Francophone (and apparently Francophile) Moroccan. The food can be very good at these places--Le Cabestan is perhaps the best--but there is a certain sameness to them, and they tend to be a bit too reminiscent of the portside restaurants of the Cote d’Azur--which is presumably not what one comes to Morocco for.

The Restaurant du Port de Peche is different. Obviously, it too has a French name--meaning simply “The Fishing Port Restaurant,” after the unglamorous, hard-working fishing port behind whose gates it is located. (There is, in fact, a bare-bones fisherman’s cafe downstairs from the main restaurant, with a blackboard menu written only in Arabic.) But both the dishes it serves and the people who eat them are considerably more diverse than usual.

The clientele includes everything from young German backpackers to elderly French merchants obviously long-ensconced in “Casa” (as nearly every French-speaker calls the city), from large Moroccan families in traditional dress to local swells in polo shirts and blue jeans. The food is not so much French as all-purpose Mediterranean (steamed clams and mussels, fried calamari , grilled swordfish, etc.) with a few Moroccan seafood dishes not commonly found in the tourist haunts thrown in--all of it fresh, honest, delicious.

What attracted me to the place immediately, though, was something more elusive: It simply had a kind of buzz to it, a warm, rackety energy that told me right away that this was the place to be.

Maybe it was the crowds. The restaurant seats about 150, and is always jam-packed, usually with a few dozen people waiting in line. (Reservations are not accepted.)

Maybe it was the lived-in, or at least dined-in, self-confidence of the corny but comfortable interior, with its red tile floors, white stucco walls, red tablecloths overlaid with pink paper, fishnet curtains on ships’-stern windows, red-shaded table lamps, and fish prints and seascapes on the walls.

Maybe it was the casual efficiency of the waiters, bustling this way and that, forever grinning, chattering, dispensing recommendations and cautions.

On my first visit to the Port de Peche, I ate a big bowl of sweet little carpetshell clams steamed in butter and their own juices; a first-rate grilled langouste or spiny lobster (more or less what we call Pacific or rock lobster), so full of flavor that I had to suck and lick every bit of juice and roe and butter from its every crevice; and finally a tajine of sea bass. The tajine is a staple of traditional Moroccan cuisine--a dish of meat, fish or fowl with vegetables, braised with spices in the dome-topped clay vessel that gives the specialty its name. Besides big hunks of excellent sea bass, this particular tajine included green peppers, green olives, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and a blend of spices in which paprika and cumin seemed to predominate. It was exquisite.

Returning to the restaurant recently, I started with one of the great secrets of Moroccan gastronomy--a platter of impeccable oysters from the village of Oualidia, 50 miles or so southwest of Casa. People who have never visited this corner of Morocco are usually surprised to learn that there are oysters raised on this coast at all. In fact, the oysters of Oualidia are superb--medium-small, salty-sweet, wonderfully full of flavor. (Adventurous travelers might wish to visit one of the several oyster “ parcs “ open to the public in Oualidia itself. Here, if you don’t insist on such amenities as bread, lemons, wine, napkins, or even forks, you can eat wonderful oysters taken out of the water before your very eyes . . . for a third or a quarter of what they cost in a good restaurant in Casa.)

After the oysters, I sampled fried baby squid and a combination of fried merlan or whiting and miniature sole. The whiting and sole were excessively battered, and didn’t seem to have been fried to order--but the fish was very fresh, and the batter was excellent. I finished with the redundantly named boulettes de merlan kefta (both boulettes and kefta mean meatballs ), tiny dumpling-like spheres of ground, spiced whiting in a thick sauce flavored with cumin and what I think was coriander. My anticipation was not betrayed.

This time at the Port de Peche, incidentally, I got to know a couple of waiters--strengthening the contacts, as it were. And I’m already thinking about what I’m going to, shall we say, dig into the next time I get there. Some mussels, maybe, small and barnacled; fried baby squid, if it’s the season; gigantic red prawns, simply grilled.