Algiers

Dining in Algiers — The Essential Guide

The White City at Table

Algiers — La Blanche, the White City — rises in terraces above the Bay of Algiers, a city of Ottoman minarets, French colonial boulevards, and the UNESCO-listed Casbah that has been inhabited since before the Roman Empire. The food culture that has developed in this extraordinary historical context draws on the full complexity of Algeria’s story: the Berber culinary foundations, the Arab and Ottoman layering, the Andalusian contribution of the Moorish refugees who arrived in the 17th century, and the century of French colonial influence that shaped the educated class’s gastronomic tastes and produced a restaurant culture of genuine Franco-Algerian sophistication.

El Djenina’s five decades in a former palace and Le Tantra’s contemporary seafood risotto represent the two ends of the spectrum: the institution and the innovation, both taking the same fundamental brief — Algerian ingredients, European technique, Mediterranean setting — and arriving at different but equally compelling expressions of what the White City can do at table.

Algerian Wine

Algeria was once one of the world’s largest wine producers — during the French colonial period, the country supplied more than a third of all wine consumed in France. The appellations of Mascara, Médéa, and Miliana produced wines of genuine quality that Algerian independence in 1962 disrupted but did not destroy. The industry has been slowly rebuilding, and the Algerian wines available in the country’s best restaurants are increasingly worthy of the vineyard landscapes that still cover the Tell Atlas foothills.