Restaurant Research

Everybody we meet wants to know about our plans for the restaurant, most importantly what type of food we’ll be serving. Our ideas of doing Mediterranean cuisine – with lighter French, Italian and some Spanish influences – are met with joyful exclamations, as this type of food is not readily available in restaurants in the medina. During our first forays into the food shopping available in Fes we have begun to see why.

So far we have not been able to find many of the ingredients that would be essential to our menu. Mushrooms? Limited to button, of poor quality and expensive. Rocket? None. Basil? Bitter, not easily available and expensive. Capers? Only in season and you have to salt and preserve them yourself. Truffle oil? None. Cheese? Expensive! Doing a Caprese salad with fresh mozzarella would hardly be worth it as your profit would be so low because of the price of the cheese. Pine nuts? None. Good risotto rice and quality pasta? Non-existent. And so on.

A discussion with a local restaurant owner about rocket made us realise we were going to have to look beyond the methods we were used to for getting provisions. After attempting to grow rocket on his own rooftop, this guy had done a deal with a local farmer to grow it. He’d bought the seed and given it to the farmer, guaranteeing that he could sell the entire crop and make a large profit. Summer had come and gone and no rocket crop appeared. Apparently the farmer had decided not to be a farmer any more and he was back to square one.

We had been hearing that provisioning was better in Casablanca and Rabat but who wanted (or had the time) to drive that far on a regular basis to get supplies? I had been formulating the idea of setting up a restaurant co-operative in order to overcome this problem. The restaurants in Fes serving non-Moroccan food were but a handful, but an emerging scene with professional service and good-quality product was evident. With rumours of between three and five new places slated for the next 18 months, the opportunity to start a collaborative body for the benefit of all of us seemed obvious.

When having dinner with the owner of one the restaurants at the forefront of bringing change to the dining scene in Fes, we found a kindred spirit. He had opened a Japanese restaurant two years earlier, but had had to broaden the cuisine to include Thai because of the dining public and provisioning difficulties. He drove to Rabat regularly to get fish fresh enough for sushi. He had also had the idea about a cooperative between restaurants but hadn’t found an ally. Over the course of the meal we resolved to start something between ourselves and then bring others on board once it was set-up. That way we could get better supplies, better prices with collective bargaining power and try to persuade some companies to deliver because we would be buying larger quantities between us.

Part of our research plan is now to make trips to Casablanca and Rabat to ascertain the produce available and talk to suppliers. We may be a year away from opening the restaurant, but these sorts of challenges need to be tackled well in advance.