A Taste of Morocco in SoHo

At Babouche, dining amid velvet pillows and wafts of rosewater scent, you can almost pretend you're in Morocco rather than SoHo — but not necessarily the most desirable sector of Morocco. The new restaurant is often crammed with tourists, and the seating is for contortionists. But, as long as you don't catch a glimpse of Fanelli's Cafe through the window, the food is properly transporting.

Babouche is a two-story downtown sister restaurant to Barbès in Murray Hill. Unlike the French-inspired, white-tableclothed Barbès, Babouche has been outfitted from head to toe in ornate finery that the owners bought in Morocco. It's lovely, but in the curtained, tiled ground-floor lounge, you're forced to eat off knee-height guéridons with uneven surfaces. Upstairs the tables are taller and mercifully flat, but they are barely able to accommodate two plates of food. Even if you get through the meal without spills, by the time it's over you're ready to return to more comfortable, stable terrain. If exoticism was the designers' intent, it succeeds all too well.

The food is traditional, which means the seasoning is careful and finely detailed. Almost never does a particular spice jump out of the complex mix; instead, several seasonings meld snugly in each dish, their seams imperceptible and their harmony unique. Even steak frites ($25), perhaps the most mundane of the offerings, are blackened with ras el hanout, a flavoring blend that can include several dozen spices, from lavender to allspice to cubeb.

Starters center on vegetables — a nice counterpoint to the meaty main courses — and include a wonderful coarse purée of smoky marinated eggplant, a cool, orange-tinted cauliflower mash accented with preserved lemon rind, and a ground-carrot dish with a delicious, unusual grainy texture. The three come as a set for $10, and provide a quick education in how delicate and flavorful such things can be. A salad of marinated beets ($10) is unusual, and one of warm, toothsome lentils ($10) stands out too, but the flavor pairing of a large whole tomato filled with sardine stuffing comes off as more odd than satisfying.

Harira ($9), a Moroccan tomato-based soup, packs a little spicy heat here, along with a magazine of tender chickpeas. When I tried a soup of the day ($9), it was an unusual concoction of rich, zingy watercress purée filled with many little scallops: an unexpected way for land and sea to come together, but pleasing.

Main course portions are gigantic — presumably measured out to please the tourist half of the clientele here, not the fashion-industry half. At $55 a person, the "traditional family-style dinner" makes a great package tour of the cuisine, especially for those with large appetites. (Watching the servers try to pile its opening act of six vegetable starters onto the miniature table, alongside bread, candle, olives, water glasses, and silverware provides some inadvertent entertainment as well. Something's got to give.) The frequently changing chef's-choice dinner encompasses two soups, a meat or fish tagine, and a couscous dish, before that's all swept away and replaced with tea and cookies.

The restaurant's version of pastilla ($20) is remarkably accomplished, a tender, spiced mince of chicken in a custardy sauce, all enshrouded in phyllo and dusted liberally with cinnamon and powdered sugar. If this sort of juxtaposition of sweet and savory can ever work, it's in this sort of pastry, which tastes like, and is, a classic. The staff is touchy about it, perhaps after some pastillas have been sent back unjustly — even though I assured my server I'd had the dish before, he checked in a couple of times while I was eating it to make sure the sweet/savory shock wasn't overwhelming me.

The only argument against the pastilla here is that it doesn't come with that moment of expectation and fragrant puff of steam that comes when the lid is lifted on the menu's several tagines. For that thrill, Babouche offers several different options. In the "couscous royale" ($23) you can barely see the couscous under a pile of turnip and zucchini, savory roast chicken, lamb shank, and delicately spicy merguez sausage. In couscous noir ($23), the tender semolina grains are dyed with squid ink and cached under a succulent pile of shrimp, big scallops, sweet steamed fish, and a link of pale, unusual seafood sausage.

The wine list is more broad than deep, and trying to pair the food's complex flavors with some of its simple chiantis or pinot grigios is an unrewarding effort. A Rhone-style red blend from Algeria's Domaine El Bordj ($10/glass) has geography on its side, at least, or close enough — there are no Moroccan wines on the list. Sugary, strong mint tea finishes the meal with an authentic kick, but the Moroccan tea cookies make a dry and unsatisfying companion; a creamy goat-cheese cheesecake with tart-sweet cherries makes a sweeter, better finish.

Moroccan food of this caliber is rare enough that I'll keep coming back to Babouche, with guests who'll tolerate the discomfort, but I'll never again take a plumb-surfaced, well-proportioned table for granted.

Babouche, 92 Prince St. (entrance on Mercer Street), 212-219-8155.