Doukkala (Moroccan fusion)		CLOSED Nov 2014 permanently
4905 Telegraph Ave @49th St., Oakland, CA
Sample menu: http://www.doukkalarestaurant.com/menu/ 
Review date: Sept 2014

We first visited this Temescal restaurant as Tanjia Moroccan, back in June 2010. We thought it was okay, nothing remarkable. We did enjoy the bastilla, of which there were three different versions. We tried the chicken, which was good, but the seafood version surprised us by being the superior bastilla.

A second visit on January 2012, however, was almost uniformly awful. The cooking had changed drastically; salads we liked the first time were harsh and unpleasant the second. The seafood bastilla tasted awful, with a strong fishiness that reminded me of nothing so much as cat food tuna. Even worse, Carlos' favorite mint tea came unsugared, with no way to add any! We left, vowing never to return.

The owner of Tanjia decided to make some changes, thankfully. The restaurant has not changed décor or layout, but the tables are now regulation height and size. This is a positive change from the ridiculous tiny hexagonal half-height tables that gave us backaches before. There is also no pretense at authenticity; every table has a fork and knife (Moroccans, like Ethiopians, eat with their fingers, using bread as a scoop).

There is a new chef, Eric Lanvert (previously at SF’s Rue Saint Jacques), who is doing "Moroccan food California style". The name has been changed to Doukkala. The menu has been simplified, although the dishes are all familiar ones to anybody who has been to a Bay Area Moroccan restaurant more than once.

Carlos and I agreed to split a bastilla, which is now listed as an entrée. A 7-inch wide pie was brought out, but it was surprisingly tall, at least 3-1/2 inches high which is twice the usual height. Bastilla is traditionally a banquet or party dish; but all Moroccan restaurants in the U.S. offer it in individual pies. Carlos adores bastilla, but he likes his bastilla very sweet, which I don't. 

But this version didn't please either of us. It was made with commercial filo dough, which is not a bad thing in itself. But it had no taste of butter, which is a very bad thing indeed. The mile-high filling had twice as much ingredients than was necessary, but with poor concept and execution. Instead it needed half the amount of ingredients and twice the technique. It stood much higher than any we've received before, but that did not make it better.

If you've never had a good bastilla, you might not realize the difference. Doukkala's bastilla filling had its sweetness from cubes of Asian pear and currants, but the chicken/egg filling tasted only of cumin. The chicken and the scrambled egg are supposed to be cooked separately, then combined to stuff the filo. Instead, it tasted and looked as if they were making a Joe's Special, cooking the ground chicken and then adding beaten egg to scramble it all together. There were even a few baby spinach leaves wilting on the bottom.

And there was a whole lot of scrambled egg in this filling. Normally the ratio is around 2/3 meat to 1/3 egg, but this was more like 50-50. Instead of using pistachios or walnuts, there were chopped roasted hazelnuts. But although good – I love hazelnuts – again they were mixed into the scrambled filling in big pieces. We prefer the nuts chopped very fine, in a discrete layer under the meat filling. 

Here, the only layering was the cubes of Asian pear and more hazelnuts, glued to the crispy bottom crust with what might have been butter and sugar, but tasted and looked more like a drizzle of dark caramelized sugar syrup. It had some sweetness but not much. All in all, this isn't a bastilla we'd order again. It's wandered too far from the original, without enough imagination or quality ingredients to make it worthwhile ordering.

Things improved with the entrées, however. We both ended up taking half our entrées home with us, as the portions were bigger than anticipated. Carlos got his usual lamb with honey and dates. He was hopeful that Doukkala's fusion bent would mean honey in moderation rather than the excess it has turned into over the decades – another example of the American sweet tooth triumphing over authenticity. 

He was pleased to find this is what happened; in fact, there was hardly any glaze at all on the lamb. There were dried apricots and prunes (reconstituted) along with a very generous amount of boneless lamb cubes, beside a modest mound of unadorned cous-cous. The lamb was tender, so dark it was almost black; and the honey was so modest in amount it was almost not there at all. He liked this a lot, and would happily come back to order it again.

I ordered the beef cheek tagine, which strangely enough comes with Borlotti beans and mashed potatoes. Unlike the lamb this had a nice gravy, not especially beefy but tasty nonetheless. It should be noted the salt level here is very low; they use it but it's very restrained. The cheeks were also a dark brown all over, and fork-tender. Neither of our dishes had any fat slicking the plates, either.

There were vegetables in the tagine. Peas and carrots, clearly frozen but decent quality, still brightly colored. Strips of fresh zucchini, impressive because they weren't overcooked. Both garbanzo and Borlotti beans, impressive because they were cooked properly, for a long enough time to give them the soft creamy interiors.

The one flaw to the cooking, which is common to Moroccan restaurants in general, is that the meats come overcooked and tend to be dry. One would think a French-trained chef could avoid this, but although it was nice to have very tender meat, we would have preferred chef Lanvert to figure out how to not dry out his stew meat.

Doukkala has a nice dessert list but on a Thursday evening they were out of two of them. Carlos got the baklava, which was two good-sized squares suitable for sharing. This was a walnut version, not the classic pistachio. It's tooth-achingly sweet, just as Carlos likes it. He ate half of one, and then had the waiter wrap the rest up for us to take home.

As usual he ordered mint tea, which you can get hot or cold. The hot is already sweetened, but the waitstaff leaves a lot to be desired although they're very nice. The first pot of tea was sweet, but when Carlos asked for a refill the tea wasn't sweetened at all. Since he was drinking the second pot with the baklava, he didn't complain, but the inconsistency is worth noting.

I tried to order the mint lemonade when we first sat down, but they were out of it. Hearing they were out of both desserts I wanted was something of a letdown. I finished instead with a cappuccino, which was bone-dry and an interesting blend. It wasn't a top quality Arabica, and yet it had an interesting bitterness underneath that reminded me of New Orleans chicory coffee.

Despite it being a Thursday, they weren't busy, with only three tables occupied although one was a party of five.   

We liked Doukkala's cooking. The new chef is much better than the previous one when it was Tanjia. But I can't help wondering if they can make it here, despite some good reviews from lesser-known food critics such as SJose Mercury News' Jackie Burrell and Brenda Ton of blogsite Bites and Bourbon. That short menu makes it a little restrictive when it comes to repeat visits, although they do some regular menu rotation. 

It's clear from all the reviews we've seen that Moroccan is virtually Terra incognita to most East Bay diners. Carlos has a point that the generous portion sizes might work to their disadvantage. Although it makes Doukkala a good value, it also makes it hard to explore the menu unless you make multiple trips. He suggested having a combo entrée, with tastes of several dishes so that people can see what they like best. 

My suggestion would be to increase the number of starters and drastically shrink that bastilla back to modest proportions. It's just not as good as it should be. Although it may not be a traditional restaurant dish in Morocco, there is no denying most people I know have fallen in love with the traditional version at the very first bite. I'm not so sure Doukkala's version is equally winning.

Still, we'd be happy to return once in a while to Doukkala, although it sits in an odd position in the Bay Area Moroccan restaurant hierarchy. On top sits Aziza, the high-end, true fusion restaurant where Morocco is just a gentle whisper over California cuisine. On the bottom level are the many other belly-dancing, no-utensil, traditional Moroccan restaurants whose menus are interchangeable with one another, everybody offering the same dozen or so dishes which haven't changed in the forty years I've been eating Moroccan food.

Doukkala wants to be in the middle, although it isn't quite good enough for that yet. It's close, though. But the question is, is there are a market for what it wants to offer diners?  We don't know. Only time is going to tell on this one.

Two people, dinner: three entrées (one split as a starter), two beverages, with tip was $106.