I actually enjoyed our one hour visit to Rick’s. But it’s a tourist trap, be warned.
Need I tell you it’s made famous by an American movie called “Casablanca?” Starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The 1942 film from the height of WWII has a cult following with various well-known quotes I won’t repeat here. It was set in a fictional place called Rick’s Café. I watched the movie before coming to Casablanca, and like most famous American movies, it’s more useful as an anthropologic record of the personality and traits that were admired in the era of its release, a little but like Top Gun was to the 80s. Today, the mannerisms and language seem anachronistic, but they were at the pinnacle of the prevailing zeitgeist at the time.
A remodeled white, soaring art deco structure houses Rick’s Café. It is one of those tourist magnets that the locals tolerate or ignore entirely. By the sea, right next to a seedy neighborhood — not dangerous, just not terribly affluent — if you approach from the south. An interesting walk, with details that show this was a beautiful quarter at one time.
The interior was well planned, and I suppose it resembled Rick’s. If you didn’t know the movie, not to worry — it was running continuously on video monitors throughout the restaurant. Great colored chandeliers hung from the domed white ceilings, adorned with little cornices. The high doors finished in Moorish arches. The famous piano in the movie is prominently there. I do not know if the pianist is perpetually called Sam.
The cafe itself is a testament to the American theme restaurant, with all its requisite trappings: bad, expensive food in synthetic surroundings. You see, Casablanca wasn’t actually filmed there. There was never a Rick’s Café in Casablanca. Entirely filmed at Warner Bros in Burbank. The midnight plane from Casablanca? Van Nuys Airport in LA.
An admittedly zealous American created this café in the 2000s.
Despite this, it is unexpectedly self serious – they provide a video on the dress code, interviewing various guests on their knowledge (generally none) on the dress code with a strange narrator out of a Hitchcock film with a mechanical voice explaining the rights and wrongs of dressing for Rick’s. It’s worth viewing for its unintended comedic value.
For our own part, once we arrived, we were looked up and by the doorman, registering approval of our dress pants, but frowning at our footwear. Were it not for our nattily dressed wives, I doubt we would have made it in. The thing about tourist traps is that they are, well, full of tourists. This was no different. Americans wearing their signature chinos and button-down shirts. Girls in travel friendly skirts. The problem with dressing formally abroad is that you cobble together whatever qualifies, leaving your puffy jackets and comfortable shoes in the hotel, to create a rather hastily put together appearance.
We had a quick beer sitting in uncomfortable chairs. Following this, not wanting much to try out the menu, we left and had a long walk into a very uninteresting quarter of Casablanca where we found a small restaurant and had our first and I will say our best tajine on the trip.
