#11: Sultan's Tent

Happy belated birthday to one of my oldest and dearest friends! (Oldest as in we've been friends for a long time...)

To celebrate, five of us went out for dinner. As one suggested we tried African food, I looked it up on the trusty old urbanspoon and filtered my search for those in the northwesterly direction.

What ended up coming up was a lovely place called Sultan's Tent in Kensington. They serve traditional Moroccan-style food.

I have never had Moroccan food in my life, so whether or not it was really Moroccan, I have no idea. I do know, however, that I am extremely full and that it was extremely delicious.

And our server had a super cute disposition.

The lighting was extremely dim. I suppose that adds a romantic touch, but for me it just made things hard to see. I got used to it, but all of the pictures came out extremely dark because I hate using flash. (Eventually I succumbed, but majority of the pictures are pretty bad -- sorry!)

Decor was awesome. It felt so... soft, for lack of a better word. Lots of fabrics, textiles, pillows; it looked like a tent. I was loving it. So comfortable.





Eating with your hands is a traditional Moroccan thing, so one of the first things our server did for us (after kindly explaining the menu to us -- honestly one of the nicest servers I've ever had.) was wash our hands.


After our hand-washing experience, the first dish that came was the "salad" that we ordered. It was basically an array of vegetables, seasoned in different ways and served with bread. You use the bread and your fingers to pick up the vegetables and eat them. They were all really good in my opinion.

It's sort of dismally dark, but the left plate was the vegetables and there were two baskets of bread.

One of my friends said that she usually takes before and after photos, which I tried doing, but I won't post them here. Mainly because I am too lazy and uploading photos onto blogger is a rather time-consuming effort.

Next up was our appetizer. It was called vegetarian briq; not quite sure what that is, but it was pretty good. And hot. There were only two, so we had a fun time splitting that up.



Afterwards, our three main dishes came. We ordered couscous vegetables, vegetable tagine and cornish game hen. (The last one we ordered in part because of its awesome name.)

The couscous vegetables came with some tomato hot sauce that was disappointingly not spicy. However, I still found it very tasty, so that was still good.

Bread was served with the food as well, mainly for dipping and to help as a "spoon". I think I licked my fingers more tonight than I have in the past few months.

The vegetable tagine was basically vegetables in a tomato sauce; it was good but not "amazing".

Our cornish game hen on the other hand... was amazing. Downright delicious. I would go back and order just that dish. (Well, probably some others to balance it out; it's pretty sweet.) But seriously, I would say it was the best dish of the evening (for me personally.) There were little apricots in there, so sweet and good. The chicken (because I'm not going to call it hen...) was cooked well, tasty, and was complemented by a really sweet but fantastic sauce.

Ordering it based on the name was more than worth it.

(I used flash! Top left is couscous, top right is hen, bottom is vegetable tagine.)

After the main course, our server asked if we were there for a special occasion. When we mentioned it was for a birthday (or two, rather), this is what came out...


We missed it with one of the cameras, so he took them back and got two new sparklers.

Seriously, such a nice guy. He would make sure things were okay but wasn't constantly bothering us.

It was a night full of good company and good food. I would definitely go back on a nice occasion, with non-germaphobic-people.