Rarely is a best meal of my life about the food. If I’m being really honest, I can’t remember what was on the plate during many of the best meals I’ve had over the years of traveling. I’ve eaten some incredibly good food, but what comes to mind first when I think back on a good meal is always the experience, and not just the moments of sitting at the table.
Everything that led me to that place, sometimes it could be weeks leading up to it, the morning of that day, what I did before or after, who I was with—that’s what makes the meal. Something even as simple as where I’m seated in the room, which in the case of my dinner at Triskala in Essaouira, was the biggest contributing factor to what I will remember as one of the best meals of my life. A few hours before that, though, my day was on a different trajectory.
During a trip out to the dunes just beyond the city, my wallet fell out of my pants pocket somewhere on the beach. I had no idea where it fell out, because I didn’t realize it was gone until I got back to the road and was ready to take a taxi back to town. I was out there for hours and the area I covered was a massive expanse of dunes and what was now a stretch of beach filling in as the tide came up.
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There’s no way for me to adequately explain how hopeless the prospect of finding my vaguely-sand-colored wallet amongst a sea of sand was. I knew I couldn’t just give up without trying, but I also knew it could have fallen out anywhere over miles of beach. To turn the knife further, I had just gone to the ATM a few hours earlier and had about 1200 dirhams ($120) inside. The money obviously wasn’t the biggest concern, but I would’ve definitely preferred losing it that morning when I had no cash as opposed to then. $120 in Morocco on my budget is about three days of expenses. If I’m being really honest, the idea of losing my wallet itself was bothering me more than the loss of it. I felt stupid, incompetent, and frustrated as hell.
I spend about 30 minutes retracing my steps and looking all around in the dunes. At the end of one section of the beach there’s a river which separates the long stretch of coast. I turn around there, since it was now impassable, and a few moments later, a man on a quad comes up to me. A kid around 12 years old or so is on the back, likely his son. The man asks me what I’m doing and I explain that I lost my wallet somewhere on the beach in the last few hours. He shows me a patch on the arm of his jacket and tells me he’s a policeman, asks me if I want to hop on the quad and search.
I’m incredibly grateful and obviously say yes, but by this point, I’m so skeptical of the wallet being found that I’m already going through a list of things I’ll need to do when I get back to my hotel: cancel half a dozen credit and debit cards, work on requesting a new drivers license, transfer money from one account and wait for it to process so I can withdraw cash again. Luckily, I have another credit and debit card back in my bag along with some extra cash, so I’m not totally screwed, but the situation is obviously not ideal (if there’s one tip of travel advice that I can share to anyone reading this, I hope it’s this: always, always keep at least a spare debit card and some extra money tucked away in your bag that you don’t carry daily and separated from your wallet/purse/wherever you keep your money and cards, especially if you’re in a country where cash is the primary accepted form of payment).
Time passes as we drive around on the beach and wet sand sprays up my back. It’s not hot, but I’m sweating profusely and feel like the kid next to me must think I’m insane. A few minutes later, the man gets a call on his cell phone. I’m sitting on the side of the quad to his right, next to the kid, with my legs dangling off the edge as we speed along the beach. “Christophe?” He asks. Right, I nod without even processing how he might know my name. He asks me something about if I have my papers in my wallet, which I take to mean my ID.
“Yes,” I reply, fumbling through an explanation to tell him my drivers license is in there but not my passport. In the few seconds that pass, my mind races through a lot of different scenarios, none of them involving my wallet and I being reunited. I didn’t feel that jumping on a quad with someone who only seemed to vaguely at best understand what I was saying was a great idea, and I worried I was about to get pulled into some kind of scam (it would be a joke on him, though, since I didn’t have a cent to my name at the moment). He was dressed in plain clothes and the patch on the sleeve of his windbreaker that I caught a two second glance of could have been a logo for a sports team for all I knew. At least we were driving in the direction of town, I thought.
“Your wallet is back there,” he said to me while pointing ahead at the town a couple of miles away. Massive WTF lights go off in my head at this point because I can’t even fathom how in the span of three hours I lost my wallet miles away on a windswept beach and it had already made its way back to town. He explained that someone had found it and brought it to the station by the port. I wanted to take a sigh of relief and just be thankful, but we still needed to get across the beach and my doubtful mind refused to fully believe it was possible. I figured at best, it was someone else’s wallet, and worst case scenario, this guy wasn’t police and I was going to get shaken down at minimum for the ride back.
As we cross the beach and get closer to town where there are more people, he drives leisurely, stopping beside a half dozen people or so to chat. It seems like every person who isn’t clearly a tourist knows him. His chattiness is endearing even though my nerves are at an ATH as I wonder if it’s really my wallet that’s at the station, or if I’m going to be let down and left miles away from where it was originally lost. At the end of the beach, we get off and he starts talking with a group of women who erupt into laughter at a joke. It didn’t seem to be about me, but I wouldn’t blame them at all if it was. I’d laugh at me, too, for goofing this hard. The kid smiles at me, jumps off the quad and leaves us.
Finally, we get to the guard station by the port and a group of guys in uniforms with carbines and batons bring me inside. One asks me to write my name on a piece of paper. When I finish, he pulls out my wallet, which has been torn apart but remarkably has all of its contents, including the money. I don’t know what to say, and since I only know about five words of Arabic, I just keep saying shukran (thank you) over and over. The guy who drove me across the beach smiles at me. “You must be a good man,” he says. “Very lucky.” I don’t think of myself as a bad person, but I certainly don’t think I’m good enough to encounter this kind of insane luck.
I take the money out of my wallet and try to quickly split it up and hand each of them an equal share, an extra hundred dirham to my new friend with the quad since he went through all the trouble to bring me several miles across the beach. The guards look at me hesitantly before one waves it away and refuses. The older man keeps saying no, dismissing it finally by telling me that this is their job. Right, I think, but I still owe you something. It does not cross my mind that the police could ever do anything helpful for anyone. Maybe in another world like here, police do more than harass and kill people. After much refusing, I leave and thank them one last time.
That my wallet was not only found, but also returned to town without a single thing being taken seems absurd to me as someone who doesn’t exactly believe in miracles. $120 stumbled upon by someone who lives here would have a much more profound impact on them than my loss of that sum of money. I leave the guard station feeling completely stunned and walk towards this wall by the sea to sit and stare at the now setting sun. On the way, a street performer is playing “Bring It On Home to Me” by Sam Cooke. None of it feels real, but my empty stomach reminds me that I am a human being still living on earth, so I look at my list of places I want to eat dinner. Triskala is the last one I’ve yet to visit, and since it’s my last night, I figure I don’t need to deliberate long. I wait to watch the sunset and linger by the sea wall until dusk falls.
This is the long winded story and set of circumstances that brings me to what will be a dinner I’ll remember forever. I wander towards the restaurant, see a few people waiting, and worry I might be SOL (small tip here which caught me off guard: if you want to eat at some of the really good places in Essaouira, make reservations). The host greets me and gives me instructions on where to go since I don’t have a reservation. It’s around a line of tables, up a small flight of wooden plank stairs with a driftwood railing, through a tiny opening that even I have to duck through, and finally into an area that might have once been a hay loft or some kind of tiny attic.
There are about six wooden pallet benches with plush cushions and small tables scattered around this tiny upper section of the restaurant. I get the sense it’s reserved for the drifting, unprepared or impromptu solo diners like me, since the configuration is such that no table would really work for more than one person. There’s a woman seated with a cat in her lap as she writes in a notebook with a few empty plates around her. She smiles and I try not to interrupt what is so clearly a moment of deep contentment and introspection.
Candles burning to their ends on every table seem to show how good of a time the diners below me are having. As is the case at many restaurants in Morocco, there’s no alcohol here. One week into being in a country where alcohol isn’t commonplace is something I’m still acclimating to and I smile inside at the fact that none of these people are drunk, they’re just having a good time amongst good company. While everyone dining doesn’t seem to be Moroccan, it’s clearly a local spot as evidenced by the familiarity among staff and people eating there. It’s also the kind of place where you might hear a Jeff Buckley or Bon Iver song, which I did, and which I loved.
A waiter climbs up the stairs and brings me a handwritten menu before explaining that each day they serve something different depending on what is available. There are three starters, three main entrees (two of which are seafood caught that day), a few drinks, and one dessert. The woman across from me finishes her tea and struggles to leave because the cat on her lap will not get up. I can’t think of any better way to explain how comfortable everyone is here. Outside the window by my table, another cat peeks inside and sits next to me when my food arrives. They’re all evidently fed well and don’t even bother trying to smell what’s on the plate.
The food I ordered is simple and perfect: potato croquettes with a spicy tomato dip, sea bream with a lemon that yields more juice than I can ever remember squeezing with such little effort, and a bunch of deliciously tender carrots and zucchini grilled with olive oil and fresh herbs. I don’t hesitate to order dessert, which is some kind of layered, whipped date cream dusted in cinnamon on top of sweet, flaky pastry slices that the waiter instructs me to eat with my hands. I order an extra pot of mint tea and sit for as long as I can.
It certainly didn’t hurt that the food was this good, but it still would’ve been one of the best meals of my life if I sat there in that room eating buttered pasta. The rollercoaster of losing, and then by luck, finding my wallet gave me some kind of weird high, but the last three days spent in this little town were just sort of perfect. I had some expectations of loving Essaouira since it seemed to have every ingredient for what I’d consider a perfect place: the beach, a vibrant arts scene, good food, and sunshine. But if I’m being really honest, I had some weird, nervous trepidation before this trip that caught me off guard. I realized that it’s my first time in a very foreign (to me) place in awhile, since I’ve spent the last few years mostly returning to a handful of countries I’d grown acclimated to. Before that started in 2023, I hadn’t really traveled somewhere this new to me since before COVID. I’ve never been on this continent, and with that, I think I was just experiencing a normal and rational feeling of fear, especially given the state of the world these days.
Losing my wallet felt like some kind of affirmation of trouble that I expected to happen. Finding it in this way reminded me that people do actually look out for each other far more than we realize. I guess it’s slightly cliché because I feel like I’ve heard a version of this type of story many times before, but I’ve never had it happen to myself. If it is a cliché and we’re to believe that they all have some element of truth, I am reminded once again that the world and a vast majority of its people aren’t just good, they actually go far out of their way to care for one another.
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