Aziza turns into a new restaurant.
I wanted Aziza to come back.
Since it “temporarily” closed more than a year ago, the memory of Mourad Lahlou’s singular Moroccan restaurant has only become more rose-tinted: a sultry, cavernous space full of alcoves and free of windows, beloved by its regulars, serving up revelatory food whose creativity and ambition sparked a new culinary language.
For years, Lahlou was steadily progressing toward the food he now serves at his eponymous glitzy downtown blockbuster, Mourad. If Aziza was a brainstorming session, then Mourad is a complete thought, fully formed upon arrival.
Like many, I had hoped that once Mourad opened, Lahlou would then bring back the old Aziza — the couscous Aziza, the lamb shank Aziza, the almond cocktail Aziza, the neighborhood Aziza.
But no. He’s instead turning it into Amara, a new restaurant that will focus on MexicanMoroccan food. Once the initial disappointment faded, the more I thought about it the more I understood: The fact that Lahlou isn’t bringing Aziza back is the whole reason we fell in love with Aziza in the first place.
Mourad Lahlou opened Aziza in the Outer Richmond in November 2001, less than two months after 9/11 and well into the resulting financial crash.
“When Aziza opened, it was so exciting,” Lahlou says of those early days. “We were pushing, but not thinking about pushing. We were just running, sprinting.”
Aziza resonated. It became beloved because it was the kind of place that San Francisco could claim as its own. This city loves to champion underdogs, especially ones we celebrated before everyone else. That’s why our Bay Area folk heroes have been the likes of Tim Lincecum and Steph Curry, E40 and Margaret Cho.
Aziza was very much a San Francisco restaurant in that sense — it was impassioned, grass-rootsy, organic, intellectual. Lahlou never worked for another chef and had no formal training, so there were no preconceived notions about what was supposed to happen.
“It was raw. It was transparent,” says Lahlou. “People could see our flaws. Somehow people made the connection that we were trying every day to be better.”
The restaurant spoke to so many different people: Young, old, locals, tourists, people who knew Moroccan food, people who didn’t. It forged connections with diners, be it through birthdays or engagements, with parents or visiting chefs. It was simultaneously traditional and nouveau.
Its Cal-Moroccan modernist food was different from the kitschy Moroccan food we grew up with at El Mansour a few blocks away. Basteeya was reinvented into cigar-like rolls and filled with duck confit. A simple cucumber salad became memorable through multiple preparations, precise plating and a boost of vadouvan. Pastry chef Melissa Chou introduced me to green strawberries.
And it was all accessible, priced more like a bistro than a fine dining restaurant, and often available for a last-minute reservation.
Most of all, it was delicious, in a new way. It became a leader in a national culinary conversation as it found its voice, though tucked away in the outer reaches of Geary, it remained relatively underrated.
Especially lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of a perfect restaurant.
It’s an idea that, for me, was spurred by Hannah Goldfield’s essay in the New Yorker earlier this summer, titled “Farewell to Franny’s, a Perfect Brooklyn Restaurant.” I love the idea that a perfect restaurant is not necessarily a four-star spot, but one whose intrigue and exceptionalism peaks for a brief moment in time. The piece was more than an elegy for Franny’s, the bygone New York restaurant; it was a celebration of the restaurant during one specific period of its 14-year life span, before it was discovered by the masses and moved to a new location.
I think maybe Lahlou wanted to avoid a similar fate with Aziza, one that might feel artificial or forced. At Aziza, Lahlou stumbled onto something. Reopening the beloved restaurant would’ve been the easy thing to do. But Lahlou made his name on an obsessive quest to avoid that path. That’s why San Francisco appreciated Aziza, in all its glories and shortcomings. Going backwards — repeating the past, to borrow a line from Nick Carraway — is antithetical to that mission, at least right now.
“It might be fair to say that Franny’s was, for a moment in time, as close to perfect as a restaurant can get,” Goldfield wrote in her New Yorker piece. “At the very least, it’s one worth remembering.”
I suspect that Aziza holds a similar memory for many San Franciscans. I know it does for me.