Sweet and Spicy

Moroccan roast chicken with onions, tomatoes, and raisins
The Somerville restaurant offers a warm, simple setting.

 

585 Somerville Avenue
Somerville, MA
(617) 623-0020 

At the rightly named Moroccan Hospitality, sisters Nouzha Ghalley and Amina Ghalley McTursh make almost everything from scratch. Traditional chicken bastilla ($5.99) is served as an appetizer, but the bundling of tastes—from cinnamon, crushed almonds, and eggs to a splash of rose water—is bold. The buttery phyllo-wrapped beef “cigars” ($3.99) hold flecks of onion, orange peel, and cilantro. Tenderly fried potato cakes ($3.99) are laced with garlic; use caution spooning on the creamy hot chili paste (harissa). For entrées, try the chicken tfaya ($13.50), roast poultry on the bone topped with a sweet and spicy mélange of caramelized onions and raisins; or a range of tagines (stews, slow-cooked in clay pots). The lamb stew has green olives and honey, while potatoes, carrots, peas, artichokes, and onions pack the vegetable version ($11.99), spiked with preserved lemon. Piles of feathery couscous with golden raisins come on the side. Last year the restaurant migrated from its original storefront in Malden to Somerville. The new environs are a healthy walk from Cambridge’s Porter Square, and offer welcome refinements: orange- and crimson-colored walls, banquettes with soft pillows, white tablecloths, and candlelight.

Sub topics

You might also like

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Unionizing Harvard Academic Workers

Pay, child care, workplace protections at issue 

Should AI Be Scaled Down?

The case for maximizing AI models’ efficiency—not size

Most popular

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard

The president emeritus on elite universities’ academic accomplishments—and a rising tide of antagonism

The Broken Social Contract

Danielle Allen on America’s broken social contract

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy