Food for thought: Moro and Morito
Samuel and Samantha Clark are the modish husband and wife founders behind the North London restaurants, Moro and Morito. The pair appear to be the ruling King and Queen of Exmouth Market, where the fashionable fortress of Moro and Morito draws in ravenous travellers and trendsetters alike. The dynamic duo met in the early 1990s after being introduced by friends due to their identical first and last names (Samantha was originally Clarke, just with a silent ‘e’). After both Sam’s did a stint in the legendary River Café, the pair married and set off as newlyweds on a life-defining journey through Spain, Morocco and the Sahara. It was a journey that would inspire the birth of their award-winning restaurant Moro, which opened in the spring of ’97. In 2010, the Clarks grew their family of restaurants and opened Morito, the popular tapas bar which sits adjacent to Moro. In 2016, they added Morito Hackney Road.
Samantha dials in for the interview from their grand-looking home in Highbury – Samuel is yet to arrive. A carved cornice runs around the high-ceilinged room where plenty of books line the shelves. The room appears to be painted in what seems to be an attractive yellowy-green Farrow & Ball paint – Carrie Symonds could take note. The brightness of the early spring sun frames Samantha as she tells me about her culinary journey. “My first childhood memories were about food. I started off baking cakes before moving onto making traditional food – pasta to coq au vin,” she explains. Samantha landed her first job at the Eagle Pub on Farringdon Road. “When I first got behind the stove, it was a total baptism of fire, but with anything, you get better and more confident,” she adds. “It felt very natural.” The chef then met her husband, Samuel, who had just left the River Café after five years, and he encouraged her to do a stint there herself.
Samuel knocks on the door, and he joins in on the conversation alongside a fluffy cockapoo-looking companion. As the dog gets comfortable in his lap, Sam explains the origins of Moro and how the concept of the restaurant was a calculated call. “We didn’t want to be yet another Italian restaurant, and we didn’t want to be a sub-standard River Café,” he tells me. “No one was doing a fusion of Spanish/Middle Eastern food at the time, and we thought it’d be a good idea to explore the Islamic side of Spanish food.”
The fusion of Middle Eastern tapas with Spanish mezze meant the pair could explore exciting avenues of taste and flavour: “Spanish food by itself may have been too limited, it’s a bit too meat and fish driven – too many pork stews and fried fish,” Samuel explains. “But by doing Eastern Mediterranean food as well, we could incorporate herbs and vegetables. In Spain, vegetables are slightly frowned upon, but in the Muslim Mediterranean, they are respected. From a menu point, it worked really well.”
The Clarks’ experiences of travelling define the menus of Moro and Morito. Pre-pandemic, the pair would venture to the hot, dry lands of Morocco, Spain, Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt; meeting locals and picking up souvenirs of Moorish cuisine along the way. “The most stimulating time for our recipes is when we are travelling,” Sam explains. Samantha adds, “as a result, we have always been far more interested in street food than restaurant food. Hence why Moro and Morito focus on the flavour, not the finesse.”
Owing to the pandemic, travel has stood at a standstill, and we have all been confined to our homes. Instead of sampling fresh hummus and on the pulsating streets of Beirut and Marrakesh, the culinary couple have been fleeing N1 by cooking recipes from 5,116 miles away: “We’ve been cooking a lot of Sichuan recipes,” Samantha tells me. “We love the texture of Chinese food, so we’ve been making our own wonton, cooking wonderful vegetables with Chinese vinegar, Sichuan pepper and fantastic cold noodles,” Sam adds.
Successive lockdowns have given the couple a chance to embrace a slow-paced way of life: “When you work in a restaurant kitchen, your routine is upside down, you’ve been cooking all day, so when you get home, you’re physically tired and cooked out”, Samantha explains. “These past lockdowns have meant we’ve had much more time to shop for food and can enjoy cooking from home. We’ve been eating simply but also like kings!”
Although the pair have appreciated having more time, they both very much miss the heat and the intensity of the restaurant, and the people working within it. “A lot of our staff are very much part of the fabric, so it’s very odd not having that daily interaction”, says Samantha. “I’m sure we’ll have lots of celebrations to make up for the lost time,” Sam adds energetically. “Restaurant life is incredibly social, it’s like being in a soap opera, it’s an intoxicating, mad, adrenaline-fueled rollercoaster. It’s very exciting.”
Not only similar in name but also in taste, both Sams’ last supper was near-indistinguishable. For Samantha’s starter, she chose a red wine risotto before a main of langoustine and aioli and a pudding of hazelnut ice cream. For Samuel, he picked a starter of white truffle pasta and a main of piri piri prawns with chips and fino sherry, before finishing things off with a really good summer pudding but, “it has to be homemade and made the day before, so the bread soaks up all the juices. That, with a really good cream.” Sam then expressed concern that the pudding was his only vitamin in his whole meal. I was quick to reassure Sam that nutritional balance is probably of piecemeal importance when his fate is awaiting him around the corner.
Back in late summer, I went to Morito with two friends. We sat outside in the glare of the sun, drinking crisp white wine as we snacked on salty, chargrilled Padron peppers. To share, we ordered beetroot borani, cuttlefish with aioli and salt cod croquettes. If it wasn’t for the creeping September chill, we could have easily been in a hole-in-the-wall tapas bar somewhere in Spain – probably Granada. When we finished, we stumbled out of Morito, bellies full and eyes-wide, wishing we could do it all over again. It looks as if it won’t be long until we can.
You can now book outdoor tables from Morito Exmouth and Morito Hackney from the 12th April. Moro will reopen on the 17th May. You can buy their cookbooks here.
Moro’s Beetroot Borani
Serve with flatbread or pitta – serves 4
Ingredients
4 medium raw bunched beetroot
1 small garlic clove (crushed to a paste with ½ teaspoon of salt)
4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons of strained Greek yoghurt
2 tablespoons chopped dill, plus a few sprigs to garnish
2 tablespoons of good-quality aged red wine vinegar with a pinch of sugar
50g feta cheese, crumbled
6 walnut halves
½ teaspoon black onion seeds
Method
Wash the beetroot but don’t peel it, then put in a pan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Cook the beetroot for about 40 minutes or until tender, topping up with water if necessary.
The beetroot is ready when a sharp knife foes through easily. Drain and leave to cool.
Peel the beetroot and blend in a food processor. You want some texture in the purée so don’t over blend.
Transfer to a bowl, add the garlic, olive oil, yoghurt, dill, vinegar and a pinch of salt and mix well.
Check the seasoning and spread the purée on a plate.
Sprinkle with feta, walnut, black onion seeds and extra sprigs of dill and drizzle with a little olive oil.