PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos — Lemon Café is a Moroccan oasis amid the hard, dry landscape of Providenciales. It is the brainchild of owner Natalie Zaidan, 35, a Canadian expat who visited the island as a child. Zaidan, who has lived here for 12 years, does high-end landscaping and owns a nursery. She designed and built Lemon Café a couple of years ago.
Chef John Tsavalas, a childhood friend of Zaidan, has created a superb Moroccan menu with tapas treats such as spicy calamari, rice-stuffed tender merguez, silky couscous, and perfectly prepared baba ghanoush. Exemplary entrees include North African moussaka with eggplant, lamb burger with yogurt mint cucumber sauce, and the most popular dish, lamb prune tagine, simmered for hours with such ingredients as honey, cinnamon, and clove. Tsavalas’s most recent creations include a sumac-rubbed rib eye roast and lobster with preserved lemon.
