After having visited Morocco (Fes, Chefchaouen, Meknes) I asked myself, after eating at Gibraltar, why I ever left my neighborhood to try Moroccan food. Rather than laud it too much from the get-go, I'll just tell you how our experiences went.
Gibraltar is on our route between the house and the supermarket, so we are always passing by there, and I have waved hello to the waiter (whose name I learned is Ismail) several times before we finally made good on our promise to ourselves to stop in. We ordered some tea and it came hot as any Moroccan tea, but with rosemary instead of mint. I wondered if there was a second type of Moroccan tea, one with rosemary, and wrote it off to my enduring ignorance of Moroccan culture. It was still good tea. With the tea came a plate of tapas...tapas?! With tea? It was a plate of chopped chocolate (nutella?) crepes. I'll let you imagine how delicious they were.
We went to finish and pay, but Ismail brought us two more teas, citing how he'd forgotten to sugar the first two appropriately. We didn't have anywhere to go, so we smilingly accepted and enjoyed another pair of rosemary teas, finishing them just a little faster than we'd finished the first round. When I went to pay, Ismail wouldn't let me! I demanded to the point of pressing money into his hand, but he refused! He was worried that we'd had a sub-par experience and the gesture was one of goodwill. I want to make something clear: I have never had such good service in Spain, or really...anywhere else in the world, given the trappings of the place (by all accounts a typical, low-rent cafe) and the size of the order (two teas!). No server has treated me, as a customer, with the care and kindness that Ismail did that day. I spent some time in the foodservice industry, and I remember how I didn't like customers gushing over good service...yet here I am, singing the praises of a man who seems to be made purely of class.
I was so impressed I returned with friends, and the experience was just as good the second time around. We tried the tagines and the couscous dishes, which arrived in a reasonable space of time. I found them superlative (better than many I tried in Morocco) and less expensive than their Moroccan counterparts.
Hear me: this place is still a hidden gem in Madrid. You can still see lots of Moroccans hanging about, taking their tea on the street corner with their unsupervised kids playing around the door. "Ethnic" restaurants which still appeal to their native ethnicities are rare and seem to lose their magic when outed to the world. Get here before that happens! read more