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All Mourad Mazouz set out to do was couscous, so where did all the celebrities come in asks Andrew Humphreys
Our photographer has been shooting for half an hour – making minute adjustments to pose and lighting – when her subject suddenly jumps up. “You know, I’m North African. I need to talk,” he says. He yanks up the hood of his woollen top and throws a series of comical poses. “The photo should act!”
Mourad Mazouz is a man obviously very used to taking charge. He’s a natural director. We meet at his central London restaurant Momo, in the late afternoon, and a team of black-clad staff is busily preparing for the evening ahead. Place settings are laid and glasses are given a last-minute polish, while huge tagines steam in the open kitchen area. As we go in search of a somewhere quiet, Mazouz casts an eye over his domain, firing off sentences in French to an employee and greeting someone with a flurry of kisses and a vicious hug.
There is a sense of anticipation. It’s like being backstage at the theatre before curtain-up.
And it’s a long-running show: Momo celebrates its 10th birthday this year. The restaurant launched in a blaze of flashbulbs in 1997, when it hosted a birthday party for Madonna almost as its first booking. “I didn’t do nothing, believe me,” says Mazouz. “I knew maybe 15 people in London and I just gave some invitations to all of them and said ‘invite who you want’. We did the opening party on Monday and Madonna came on Friday. The next Monday the restaurant was packed and it has never stopped since then.”
The restaurant was followed up by a basement bar and live-music club, which went on to spawn a record label, and by an adjacent Moroccan tearoom. Then came Sketch – a remarkable conversion of an 18th-century Mayfair town-house – that catapulted to infamy upon its opening in 2002 by virtue of being Britain’s most expensive restaurant. Critics were both ecstatic and appalled (“Wear a blindfold in preparation for the arrival of the bill,” warned The Independent’s food critic Matthew Norman), although most agreed the food, created and overseen by acclaimed French head chef Pierre Gagnaire, was (and still is) nothing short of brilliant.
London restaurants by the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Joël Robuchon attract the foodies, but those who want to be seen while out eating tuck in their napkins at Sketch. On one memorable night, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and supermodel Helena Christensen all dined there at the same time – quite a casting coup for a man who claims to be really bad at marketing and business: “I know how to receive people and give them food, but to do all the rest I am terrible,” he says.
Mourad Mazouz was born in Algeria in 1962. It’s not a place to which he feels that attached: “I popped out of my mother, looked around and thought ‘Oh my god, Algeria’. I tried to go back in, but they pulled me out.” He left, aged 15, and bolted to Paris, where he worked as a cleaner for three years. After a stint in PR, he left for New York. “My girlfriend left me and I was destroyed, so I left my job and I travelled.”
Mazouz worked in New York and Los Angeles, then spent six months in Indonesia, but on his return to the US he was expelled for not having a Green Card. “I returned to France with nothing. My dream was to be a captain of a boat, but I decided to work in a restaurant because when I was in LA that was what I did.”
He asked four friends to lend him $10,000 (by telling them he already had $30,000 of his own) and, with the $40,000 gathered, he opened a bistro called Au Bascou, later crowned Paris Bistro of the Year. Two years later, he opened a second restaurant, called 404 – as in Peugeot 404. “All North Africans, all Egyptians, all Arabs, everybody has a 404. It was a joke – when the Arabs invade Europe they will come in 404s.”
Mazouz sold Au Bascou in 1993 (he still owns 404 and the restaurant is still fully booked every night). Having fallen in love with an Englishwoman, he began spending weekends in London and, in 1995, he made a more permanent move over the Channel. “I saw there was no couscous in London, so I thought ‘I’m going to do something’.”
That something was Momo. Just as with 404, the concept was simple: Moroccan cuisine served in a setting straight out of the film Casablanca, with an atmosphere like a Marrakech street party. “At the time, everything was very minimalist. We did the opposite. You could dance on tables, forget yourself for a few hours.” Momo is also renowned for having the best-looking wait staff in town, dressed in T-shirts designed by Anglo-Moroccan pop artist Hassan Hajjaj (who also designed Mazouz’s Andy Wahloo bar, next to 404, which opened in 2001).
Although a self-professed North African Berber nomad, it has been 12 years since Mazouz settled in London. “I didn’t come to England because I wanted to come, I followed someone. But now I have Momo, I have Sketch – and London is very, very juicy. You can never be bored.”
The success of his London and Paris ventures make it all the more surprising that Mazouz hasn’t made more of the Momo brand. A short-lived collaboration with London department store Selfridges was dissolved over contract disagreements and there is just one other restaurant, Almaz, which opened last year in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates. “I’m never going to do another Momo – nowhere. You cannot ask Zaha Haddid or Frank Gehry to do, two times, the same building. On my little level, I’m the same.”
Almaz’s interiors are by the Beirut-based designer Anna-bel Karim Kassar and include her signature “stocking” lights, which are macrame stockings stuffed with illuminated halogen spheres. It differs from Momo in one major respect: it doesn’t serve alcohol. “I wanted to have a space for the locals. If you don’t drink alcohol, where do you go to eat as a Gulf person? So I made a high-end restaurant with fine dining, a sheehsa room and no alcohol.”
Mazouz says he has no desire to do anything more than what he is currently doing. “Almost every month, I get a great proposal to open something somewhere. But I don’t want to do any of them.”
He has two of the most talked about restaurants in London and mixes nightly with the rich and the famous, but Mazouz claims to have no interest in celebrity or material possessions: “I have more than I ever dreamed of. I never buy things. For me, the most important thing is friends and laughing. If you were to tell me, ‘leave everything and come and we will laugh every day’, then tomorrow I leave. I can live anywhere. Anywhere.”
THE MOURAD MAZOUZ RESTAURANTS & BARS
PARIS
404 69 rue des Gravilliers, 3rd arrondissement, tel +33 (0)1 42 74 57 81, Mº Arts et Métiers
Andy Wahloo 69 rue des Gravilliers, 3rd arrondissement, tel +33 (0)1 42 71 20 38, Mº Arts et Métiers
LONDON
Momo & Kemia Bar 25 Heddon Street, Mayfair W1, tel + 44 (0)20 7434 4040, www.momoresto.com
Sketch 9 Conduit Street, Mayfair W1, tel +44 (0)870 777 4488, www.sketch.uk.com
DUBAI
Almaz Level 3, Harvey Nichols, The Mall of the Emirates, tel +971 (0)4 409 8877
PHOTOGRAPHY CHARNEY MAGRI
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