when you want, where you want.
I’ve Been a Regular at Cafe Mogador for 40 Years
Photo: Eye Ubiquitous/Alamy
For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here.
I arrived in Manhattan by train from Toronto, in September 1983, to start an off-campus studio program. It must have been early evening, and we all packed ourselves and our luggage into a large (old-school) checkered yellow cab, headed downtown from Grand Central. One of the first stops was at St. Marks Place and Avenue A. As the cab turned the corner from Third Avenue, a vibration took over our ride and throngs of people on the sidewalk spilled out along the one-way running into Tompkins Square Park. It was electrifying, even for a nonchalant bumpkin from Thailand, an energy the city was famed for and thrived on, from song lyrics to the advertisement of the day, the “I ❤️ NY” campaign of the ’80s. It was all pulsating on St. Marks Place. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it.
Not much is left from that version of the East Village. But Cafe Mogador, which opened the very same year I arrived in New York, remains. Even the menu has not wavered in 40 years: The flavors of Moroccan eggs with their spicy tomato sauce and the sides of merguez sausage warm my Sunday belly at brunch. For midday meetings, I like to have the lamb-shank tagine with a sauce of preserved lemon and olives, acidic and tangy, but a meal to end all meals for the rest of the day, accompanied by grains of couscous. Of course, entire days used to be spent there, slow, long days of nursing a demitasse of espresso or an oversize bowl of café au lait, one after another on a cold winter’s afternoon or in the exhausting heat of midsummer. Mogador is an oasis of memories.
St. Marks institutions Cafe Orlin and Yaffa Cafe are now long gone. It was sad when Leshko’s — the diner around the corner on Avenue A — closed. Then, later, it was upsetting when Odessa, a couple of doors down, was routed. Superiority Burger has opened in the old Odessa, the banquettes still intact, but with a very different menu and clientele on offer. The Holiday Cocktail Lounge is somehow still on St. Marks, but every drink is no longer a dollar.
I still live in the East Village, in an apartment on 7th Street. As an artist, I don’t have a studio space where I can spend my days lingering on work or space at home should an occasion arise that needs the personalization of a “studio visit”; Mogador is my primary choice to entertain such requests. I cherish it. The crowd may have thickened and changed, but even the rotations of young people staffing the café have somehow kept the bohemian touch. The au lait flows and the couscous is oh so warming. I return not for the memories but for the persistence of flavors and the resistance to the ever-crushing tide of change.
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