Sam and Sam Clark, the husband and wife behind Moro, the hugely trendy Spanish/Moorish restaurant in London, talk to Louise East
Recipe books produced by restaurants are often little more than bloated advertisements for themselves, over-burdened with complicated dishes involving boiling goose fat, or signature dishes diluted to the point of pointlessness. But every now and then, a restaurant cook book jumps the wire and becomes a foodie phenomena. It happened with the River Café cook book series and with Peter Gordon's 1998 hit, The Sugar Club Cook Book; long after he left the Notting Hill restaurant, home cooks still swore by his Asian fusion recipes. In the past five years, one restaurant cook book has shot to the top of the foodie league - Moro The Cookbook.
The secret to Moro, both restaurant and books (a second book, Casa Moro is just out) is not just the quality of the food, but its smart blend of Spanish traditional dishes with those of the spicier Moorish south. A dish of chorizo, pimentón or jamón might sit happily on the menu alongside one featuring tahini, fresh mint and harissa. Rarely, if ever, do the two meet on a plate. Moro is not about fusion so much as a proximity. The chefs at Moro like food to taste of where it comes from, and are wary of serving what they describe as a Moroccan vegetable with a Lebanese sauce.
The creators of Moro are a young, London-born husband and wife team, by the name of Sam and Sam Clark. That they both have the same name is rather indicative; if the Clarks's cookbook is a foodie success story, their personal tale more resembles an over-blown romantic caper.
Sam Clark was cooking in London's first gastropub, The Eagle, when a university pal, Mark Sainsbury, kept telling her about an old family friend, Sam Clark, who was at that time cooking at the River Café.
Three months later, the couple got together, and before long, they were working together, too. "I wanted a more relaxed job while I looked for a head chef position somewhere, so Samantha got me a job at The Eagle," says Samuel. Samantha recalls: "That was a really good time. There were only two chefs in The Eagle kitchen, and we discovered we really enjoyed cooking together, just doing things we wanted to do." Samuel adds: "It was quite fast and furious, so we learnt that we could work well together under pressure. It didn't all fall to pieces." In time, Samuel returned the favour, and secured Samantha a job at the River Café. "I hadn't had any formal training, so I wanted to work in a proper restaurant," Samantha explains.
The couple are the first to admit that their time at The Eagle and the River Café influenced what they wanted to do with Moro, which they opened in partnership with mutual friend, Mark Sainsbury in 1997. Samuel explains: "We were aiming to introduce people to the less familiar sides of Mediterranean cooking, to put the production values we'd learnt at the River Café into less familiar foods such as those of Spain and the Muslim Mediterranean. You just couldn't get that in London at that time."
Samuel sold his London flat, and they took on a lease on a building in Exmouth Market. But with the building open to the sky, and their living quarters consisting of a single bed in Samuel's mother's flat, they decided to take an extended honeymoon in Spain and Morocco. They bought a camper van, and spent three months driving, eating and formulating their own menu. "What we did was go into a restaurant and eat, then buy the ingredients in the market and re-create the dish in the camper van," explains Samuel.
The restaurant was an immediate success with both critics and punters, so much so that it's difficult to see how Sam and Sam found time to produce not just Moro The Cookbook in 2001, but also their children, Luke (4) and Eve (2), then a second cookbook, and two years ago, a second home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Spain.
The influence of the new foothold in Spain is all over their second book, Casa Moro. The jewel-bright cover is taken from a tiled wall in the village, and there's a whole section of recipes gleaned from the local food of Las Alpujarras. "Really, the whole thing about the new book is that it's about home cooking," Samantha points out. "As a title, Casa Moro is a double twist, in that it's about this house we found in the mountains, but also about how the whole ethos of our food is cooking from the home."
But aficionados will also notice new influences creeping in, from Istanbul and Cyprus, as well more Morocco-inspired recipes. "We've got more adventurous, a little more confident about our taste," says Samuel. "Cooking with fruit, cooking with sugars, and Moroccan food, these were all things we didn't want to jump into before we had a decent understanding of them. So we've travelled more since the last book, and we've learnt more about these incredible flavours."
The couple rarely work the same shifts anymore, not because of name-confusion in the kitchen ("There is sometimes a double head jerk when someone shouts 'Sam'," says Samuel) but because one of them will take care of the kids while the other is cooking. "We've never found living and working together intense," says Samuel. "Actually, it's been very therapeutic, because if I say to Sam 'We did 70 for lunch,' she can relate to it, while I can relate to putting the children to bed. The thing is, we both totally enjoy coming to work and cooking. So the plan is just to enjoy it." What better ending for a fairy tale than that? u
Casa Moro is published by Ebury Press (£25 in UK)