A friend of mine took his date to the new Casablanca restaurant in Connaught Road, Avondale, blithely assuming he’d be getting Moroccan food (the wonderfully richly spiced and herbed merguez and tagines I enjoyed fairly recently in Agadir) as Casablanca is the largest city and main port of Morocco.
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Or possibly Italian or Spanish grub, because casa blanca means “white house” in either language.
But no, for some unfathomable reason (and for my sins I forgot to ask the proprietrix why…maybe she’s a fan of the classic 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Berman in which Bogie never asked Sam to “play it again”?) Casablanca is the name of Harare’s latest of a burgeoning number of Chinese restaurants catering for local fans of that cuisine and thousands of Chinese immigrants and ex-pats flooding here each year.
(If you don’t believe me, fly in on Emirates from Dubai or Ethiopian Airways from Addis Ababa any day and see how many Orientals de-buss here!)
[It doesn’t worry me, but I seem to recall “someone” insisting that Zimbabwe would never be a colony again!]
Well Casablanca is a Cantonese-cuisine eatery housed in what I regard as a breathtakingly spectacular and interesting art deco former colonial-era dwelling in one of Harare’s more pleasant leafy suburbs.
It used to belong (I am assured) to the Stambouli family, a Greek clan with an apparently Turkish name, who ran butcheries pre-independence and in two separate earlier incarnations was The Shilla, which specialised in Korean and Japanese food.
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The Shillas were run by two separate very amiable Christian South Korean couples who were fired by and filled with enthusiasm for their projects.
But their restaurants were rarely filled with punters: Mainly because their religion forbade them from trading on the Sabbath and, not insignificantly, due to Zimbos knowing very little of Korean culinary styles and apparently not being in much of a hurry to learn!
Sadly the husband in the last duo died suddenly and his widow returned to the Korean peninsula, so the present owners, brother-and-sister John and Xiujaun Song took over the premises in January and opened for business in August. She ran restaurants back in China until moving here a couple of years ago.
I was the only non-Chinese customer when I checked out the place on Wednesday lunchtime. It was a hot, muggy day but a seat on the verandah, blessed by a refreshing breeze, overlooking a sparkling swimming pool brought some relief from the climate. A couple of icily chilled Golden Pilseners also helped!
I spurned eating indoors because of the temperature and as an enormous flat-screen TV bellowed out Chinese news in high-pitched Cantonese (or Mandarin!)
As regulars will know, I’m an unreformed soup-a-holic, so was delighted to see on an uncluttered easy to follow menu that soups on offer included sharks’ fin (medium US$5; big US$15); chicken and mushroom at US$3/US$10 and chicken noodle at US$3/US$5. Thick soup of minced beef and egg was US$3 or US$10; the hot-and-sour soup I’m very fond of was US$2 and US$6 and seaweed soup US$2/US$6.
I was torn between the seafood-and-noodles soup and Thai seafood soup, both at US$4 or US$12 for a “big” bowl.
As I’d seen how really big those bowls were a smallish individual serving bowl was more than adequate and I think four-bucks was great value as the subtly spicy broth (the Thai version used chilies) was jam-packed with small but plump pink prawns, what looked to be chunks of crab-stick, an unidentified line fish (or bits thereof), mushrooms, lots of lovely noodles about the thickness of spaghettini and dark green seaweed.
It was one of the nicest, most nourishing, soups I’ve eaten in months, notwithstanding quite a few Thai seafood soups and laksas enjoyed in Australia over Christmas and when I go again I may order a big bowl of the stuff with perhaps a plate of spring rolls (US$6) and that would be a light, digestible lunch.
There was nothing really wrong with what I did order as a main course: vegetables (diced and chopped cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, peas and onions) and noodles which were served a few minutes before the iconic Cantonese sweet-and-sour pork.
But there was just too much of it and it cooled rapidly in the breeze off the pool so both the pasta and the pork (which began as delicious) became unpleasantly greasy. There was enough food for two or even three punters and had I invited guests we’d have wolfed it down much quicker.
(Despite severe reservations about reheating pork or chicken it warmed up quite successfully for supper.)
I wonder, though, why so few Zimbabwean Chinese restaurants (and I can’t think of any post-independence operations) have ever used the methylated spirits-fired chafing dishes which keep such food at an acceptable temperature level almost anywhere else in the world?
My bottom line: an absolutely splendid seafood soup, an exemplar of its kind; vegetable noodles and sweet-and-sour pork, which I’d order again tomorrow if I went team-handed and two lagers cost US$20. Amusingly the bill is in Chinese script, which will be interesting when I claim expenses!
Casablanca, 15 Connaught Road, Avondale (just past Argyle traffic robots). Opens lunch and supper daily. Fully licensed. Eating indoors or out. Child and reasonably handicapped friendly. Safe parking on premises. Telephone 0775-720-999) [email protected]
