Flavour Profile: Azouka Eatery, Scandinavian-Moroccan fusion, Essaouira
Azouka Eatery in Essaouira stands out in medinas crowded with offerings of tagine, falafel salad, cous cous. How?
Husband and wife owners Soufiane and Kaja bring a Scandinavian flare. Processes and produce drawn from different spaces brought together on a menu that we are still talking about on a daily basis.
This is good food.
Salt-cured sardines fresh from the Essaouira port meet earthy za’atar oil, cut through with a six-minute pink-pickled egg. Grilled cabbage nestled in sweet and salty quince miso puree, zingy with berry vinegar and parmesan. Confit chickpeas on herby labneh scooped up with chunks of chew sourdough rye focaccia.
Sweet apple ice cream, Norwegian ginger bread crumble, blue cheese…
deserves its own line. Though that might be my sweet tooth typing.
Homemade fermented drinks. Firey ginger beer, hibiscus and cardamom, pear and lavender. Heavenly.
Kaja and Soufiane kindly spent time before service to talk with me about the experience of opening Azouka, finding their balance breaking the Moroccan restaurant mould, bringing Scandinavia to Essaouira and their plans for a farming future.
Soufiane and Kaja
Soufiane was out chasing Moroccan bureaucracy when I arrived, and joined us later. I chatted with Kaja to begin with, whilst the wonderful Leila and Najat continued prep for service in the kitchen.
This is a slightly edited version of our conversation.
I start off asking Kaja about her background…
Kaja: My mother is from California, my father from Norway, and I grew up in Belgium and Switzerland. My Mum never really cooked American food - I don't think there is such thing as America as food culture - so she really cooked what she likes to eat.
And what impact did that have on creating menus for Azouka?
The challenging thing for me because is that I don't have any food culture. That’s different to Leila and Najat here, or what Morocco has, where Soufiane will call his Grandma and ask for a recipe.
But the positive is that I don't see any boundaries to how I cook. In Moroccan cuisine there are a lot of rules, like you don't put beets in a tagine, while I would do that.
I come with this curiosity and an open mind and then I'm challenged by these different boundaries or cooking techniques or way of eating that allows us to try to create something a bit different here.
The gorgeous lunch we shared described above
What brought you to Morocco in the first place?
Kaja: I’m not from a cooking background having studied hospitality and management. Then I worked in lots of different areas, travelled, and returned to Norway to study agroecology when I met Sufijan ten years ago.
We moved to Morocco, to Essaouira, as Soufijane had bought a piece of land by the ocean. The plan was to open an agro-guesthouse, and with low boundaries to entry to open a restaurant in Morocco, that’s where we started. In one month, and with very little money, we prepared the space with second hand equipment and DIY decorating.
Where did the name for Azouka come from then? (At this point Kaja laughs and looks a little embarrassed)
Azouka is the amazigh for the thuya tree. On our land there are a lot of trees, we thought they were thuya trees so named the restaruant after them, even created a logo. It turned out that they’re juniper trees, but we kept the name!
To me it seems a happy accident, a plant so central to Scandinavian cooking making its appearance on the land of a couple bringing together the Moroccan and Sandinavian land.
I ask about how her relationship to cooking has changed, both now with the pressure of the business, but also when creating a fusion menu
Kaja: I've never run a kitchen before, and I've never written a menu before. Now I struggle to find cooking as a creative outlet, I put a lot of pressure on myself.
I am always having to re-learn and question myself as a white immigrant here and someone who comes from a privileged background, I am constantly having my relationship changed as to how people work here, how people eat there, so that's where we (Kaya and Soufiane) balance each other out as he's able to bring me back down to earth.
I think he plays a big role in always wanting me to use local ingredients. We're having to constantly challenge each other because sometimes we can’t find a local equivalent, and then I'm having to re-think how to cook that ingredient or that dish.
At this point Soufiane joins us, popping a bag of fresh sardines into the kitchen, grabbing a coffee, pulling up a chair.
I ask him what there is on the current menu that has been shaped by what was available.
Soufijane: When we started creating this new menu, quince was in season and we were thinking of a quince tagine that we love. Najat, who works with us does this very, very, very well. And she (Kaja) did a great job just making it in a puree with miso which really makes a dish with the cabbage.
The way Kaja thinks, the flavour combinations, the colours, that is something creative that comes from her and how she speaks to the customers that come.
When you first opened, did you feel like people were listening?
Salt-cured sardines, garlic za’atar oil, 6 minute egg
Kaja: When we started we had a totally different concept. We were going to do sandwiches. And the first week it didn't feel right so we changed to sharing plates.
Sufiane: Now, most of our customers come from a location they've had already two, three days of tagine and cous cous, they're happy to go back to something that is inspired by Moroccan food, but you're still going to taste the produce of Essaouira.
How do you find your produce?
Soufiane: That's a big, big challenge. I think in Morocco, unfortunately, and even more in the Essaouira region, the culture of small scale producers in contact with restaurants does not exist anymore, or very little, or it is really over priced.
It's above what we can pay in order to keep our food affordable, a constraint that we put on ourselves early on. We wanted this place to be a casual restaurant. Somewhere that you can go to without really thinking 'I’m going to spend and this is going to go into my budget of me pleasing myself through food.'
Now we have customers who come three, four times a week, not just see people once every three months. So we were forced to look for produce that was good, fresh, but not necessarily from somewhere branded as organic or really selling the top notch produce.
So how does the concept of beldi come into this? A phrase I’d come across regularly, usually meaning local and organic produce.
Soufiane: Beldi means everything and nothing at the same time. So we really have to be careful. Beldi comes from the countryside, but I've seen how people work in the countryside and you don't want to be eating these vegetables because they are sprayed. They are not farmed in the nicest way. So beldi right now is just a way to say 'ahh buy this because it's beldi' but you don't really know.
Right now I think we really have to shift the mentality in Morocco and make sure we know who is farming this produce to make sure that they are farmed the right way. There is no control at state or government level of what exactly is allowed and what is not allowed. To the point that when some of the produce is exported abroad it is sent back because there are too many pesticides.
So in my family and at Azouka we just go to the market. We use our senses, our relationship with the person that owns the vegetable shop to make sure that what we get meets our standards.
And then the only other way we find to do that is to grow the produce ourselves. We took over the farm in July, put in the infrastructure - dug a well, set up solar panels, then a chicken coop - and we started planting one month ago. The first salad, the first leaves, radishes. This first year is just an experimentation to see what grows well.
What other plans do you have for the future then?
Kaja: We're trying to find more meaning in what we do. We are very grateful to the customers that come through, but I would love to give back more to the community. We don't have many Moroccan customers. Even though we are casual, we are not affordable to everyone. So I think that I would like to find more meaning in what we do either through education or training.
We're also here everyday, all day long, so we need to find some more time. Or step back a bit from being here morning to evening and handing things more over. It’s hard, at a lot of successful, consistent businesses, the owners are present, but we have to find a balance.
Sweet apple ice cream, Norwegian ginger bread crumble, blue cheese
Out of interest, and a lack of confidence, I ask how it’s been talking about Azouka.
Soufiane: Talking about Moroccan food is the best way because it's a very oral thing. There's something with instinct, things that have been passed on for generations and generations.
And I think talking about Moroccan food is all about talking to the people cooking it, more than just approaching the recipe itself. You can give two households side by side the same ingredients and the harira won't come out the same way.
Kaya: There's a revival of Nordic cuisine that started with Noma, but these are £150 tasting menus. So the revival is more niche, and the every day family are cooking a different cuisine every night.
Soufiane: A successful business depends on putting your soul and identity into it and we are really proud of serving our food.
Azouka is open Tuesday - Saturday for lunch and can be found at Place Al Khaima, Rue Laalouj, Essaouira 44000, Morocco
Their Instagram is: https://www.instagram.com/azouka_essaouira/