09-08-2016
Valeria Senigaglia takes us to Mourad in San Francisco, where self-trained chef Mourad Lahlou presents his Moroccan cuisine with Californian influences: New Moroccan, that’s how they call it. And he also has a Michelin star
Once upon a time in America a Moroccan student missed the comfort of his home food. To solve the issue, the student learnt to cook, opened a restaurant in that foreign land and finally... earned a Michelin star. This happy ending for Mourad Lahlou, patron-chef at the homonymous restaurant in San Francisco, started in Marrakech where he spent his first twenty years surrounded by the intoxicating aroma of spices. Mourad arrived in America in 1986 so as to graduate in Economics. However, he found out cooking was more interesting than numbers and started a career as a self-trained chef using friends and colleagues as his first “culinary guinea pigs”. A do-it-yourself chef, but this doesn’t mean he was less talented or less passionate about creating something unique by using techniques and ingredients that escaped the rules of classic cuisine. This, it turned out, was the right weapon to conquest the title of Moroccan-American cuisine pioneer.
The Mourad scenic building
But Mourad wanted more. He wanted a place in which to express his creativity to the highest level. So in 2015 the restaurant named after him was born.
Mourad Lahlou
Inside the restaurant
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by
Born in 1985, marine biologist and sustainability and cooking enthusiast. After living in many places, from NY to the Philippines, she returned to Italy and worked in communication as a freelance journalist. Now she lives in Australia