Two years ago, a lovely Moroccan restaurant called La Maison du Couscous opened in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Tiny, cozy, tucked away on a side street, and with a wonderful menu of satisfying dishes, the place was clearly a labor of love and quickly became my favorite New York choice for Moroccan food.

I wasn’t alone in that assessment. As praise from various quarters began snowballing, it became fairly obvious that La Maison was going to outgrow its small storefront space. When I mentioned this to one of the owners about 18 months ago, he smiled and said, “Yes, we’re looking at spaces on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens. We want something much bigger – not just so we can have a bigger kitchen, but so we can also have things like a belly dancer. It’ll be great!”

I smiled and nodded, but belly dancing on Smith Street wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. In fact, it sounded like the sort of trendy theme-park approach that was the diametric opposite of La Maison’s homespun appeal. Still, if that’s what they wanted, who was I to say no? I wished them well and silently hoped they didn’t graduate to Smith Street too soon.

As it turns out, we all got a bit of what we wanted. The owners sold La Maison (which continues on, although the food has gone downhill) and opened a new restaurant, called Les Babouches. It’s not on Smith Street, where the rents turned out to be too high – instead, they stayed in Bay Ridge, but now they’re on Third Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, with its own restaurant row. The new space isn’t large enough to accommodate a belly dancer, but on a recent Friday there was a musician plucking out pleasant Moroccan music on a gorgeous stringed instrument. It all feels like a reasonable compromise between ambition and charm.

Most importantly, the food is still great. And this is the ideal time to sample it, because Moroccan cuisine, with its stewed meats, layered pastry dough, and couscous, is perfect for autumn.

A good place to start is with an order of briwat, which are triangular phyllo-dough mini-pies. One version, stuffed with chicken ($5), is pleasantly savory, but the seafood rendition ($7) is even better, loaded with calamari, shrimp, and overtones of cilantro. Herbivores may prefer the “vegetable cigar” ($6), essentially a very light spring roll stuffed with peas, carrots, and potatoes.

There are several excellent salads (all $6), each one molded into a gently compressed puck. The best one features roasted peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. Garlicky roasted eggplant is also excellent, as is the tangy sauteed spinach with salt-preserved lemon (a wonderfully sour-salty ingredient found in many Moroccan dishes). A more conventional Mediterranean salad, featuring tomatoes, mozzarella, and olives, will satisfy the less adventurous.

The heart of Moroccan cooking is the tagine. The term refers both to the stewed preparation of meat, vegetables, and spices, and to the cone-topped earthenware vessel in which the food is served.

Moroccan food can either be sweet or savory, a dichotomy that’s evident in two of Les Babouches’s chicken tagines. One of them, called mrakkad ($14), finds a gorgeously tender chicken breast surrounded by green olives, preserved lemon, and potato wedges. The sharp flavors couldn’t be more different from the sweet notes found in the tfayah ($14), which features a leg and thigh slathered in sweet golden raisins and caramelized onions. But both dishes work beautifully.

The best of the several lamb tagines is tiznit ($16), a gorgeously slow-cooked lamb shank surrounded by stewed prunes and toasted almonds that retain their crunch despite swimming in a thick pan sauce. There’s also a daily fish tagine ($18), which on one recent visit featured tasty hunks of swordfish surrounded by carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes, topped by a surprisingly spicy lemon-olive sauce.

The menu also offers a choice of bastella, thick phyllodough pies. Again, there’s a sweet/savory split: the chicken bastella ($14) consists of shreds of poultry intermingling with layers of eggs, sugar, and cinnamon, while the seafood bastella ($16) is like a larger, sharper-flavored version of the seafood briwat appetizer.

The restaurant’s one major failing is the grill. A platter of merguez ($15), the spicy Moroccan lamb sausage, is extremely dry and not very spicy. The other kebab offerings, available individually or, as I tried them, compiled into a mixed grill platter ($17), are extremely dry as well. Asking for them “not so well done” might help, but why bother? There are plenty of great kebab houses around town, so stick to the tagines and bastellas.

A side of couscous ($4) is a no-brainer, “when in Rome…” choice. Steer clear of the Moroccan rice ($4), which takes the sweetness element too far – an infusion of orange-blossom essence makes the rice taste almost perfumed, like the flavor equivalent of Glade air freshener.

Even if you avoid the rice, there’s a good chance that you’ll end up eating enough sweet food to make dessert seem unnecessary. But if you’re one of those people who never put “dessert” and “unnecessary” in the same sentence, creme caramel ($5) is agreeably eggy on top and toasted on the bottom, and rice pudding ($6) comes in three layers, each tinted a different color, providing some welcome visual interest for a dish that usually looks so bland. A plate of small Moroccan cookies ($5) makes for good nibbling while sipping a cup of mint tea ($4 for a small pot, $6 for a large).

There’s no liquor, but you’re welcome to bring your own. Just don’t drink so much that you end up belly dancing.