Zizi Limona

THE oxtail is in a state of beautiful disarray, all tangled, velvety strands, the tough guy turned moony poet. It has been sluiced with silan (dates boiled down into honey), barraged with cinnamon sticks and braised for five hours until utterly undone.

In Morocco, the meat would have been packed in a terra-cotta urn and buried overnight in the ashes at the local hammam. At Zizi Limona, which is merely in Brooklyn, it is cooked in an ordinary pan in an ordinary oven. (Such is life with the city health department.)

As for the name: it is happy nonsense, invented by the owners, veterans of Middle Eastern establishments in Manhattan who wanted to be free of culinary or geographic limitation. Zizi Limona could be Israeli or Italian, a grandmother squeezing lemons on a sun-swamped veranda, a memory to keep you going through the winter.