Chef Najat Kaanache reflects on a childhood spent hungry, the role of cooking for women, and the lack of Michelin stars in Africa.
She has been called The Pilgrim Chef. A trip around the world took her via the star restaurants Alinea in Chicago, and Noma in Copenhagen, to The French Laundry, Per Se and El Bulli.
And a few years ago, she opened a fine dining restaurant in Morocco – which has no stars.
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“It’s unfair. Why doesn’t Michelin give stars to Africa?” says Najat Kaanache. “Personally, it doesn’t matter that much, but it doesn’t feel it’s right”.
Kaanache is intense and colourful and speaks her mind about most things, including food, politics, the role of women in the restaurant world, and how Spain took much of its culinary identity from Arab culture. “All spices, how to cut meat, how to grow, everything that the Spanish claim is Spanish culture comes from the Arab world,” she says.
Kaanache is Spanish and was raised in the Basque Country by Moroccan parents. Once a soap opera actress on Spanish television, she travelled the world working to empower women and children before attending culinary school, gaining the title ‘Pilgrim Chef’ while blogging about her four years of training with some of the world’s leading – and most demanding – chefs, including Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz, and Heston Blumenthal. Today, she hosts a cooking programme called Cocina Marroquí on the AMC network that is broadcast in 20 countries.
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We’re sitting in her restaurant Nur, in the middle of the labyrinthine medina of Fez, in Morocco. It’s a restaurant that has received several fine awards, including Africa’s Best, and the World’s Best Moroccan Restaurant. All major newspapers and magazines have visited her, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue and the restaurant had a full reservation book for its first three years. Then came the pandemic, with Morocco one of the last countries to re-open to tourism.
“Of course, it was tough, but now we have started again. And I own the house and the restaurant – how many chefs own their restaurant? I value that freedom immensely. It allows me to work here day after day and create my food,” says Kaanache. This is not her first rodeo in the turbulent world of hospitality and she has taken the downtime to expand her empire.“We have opened a tapas restaurant in Rabat at the Marriott Hotel. It’s called Ikatza (Basque) because all the food is prepared over an open fire. I have also opened a restaurant outside Tangier,” she says.
That she dared to open a small luxury restaurant in Morocco was, according to the chef, a necessary step. “When I opened Nur, I felt free. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. My father came to Spain barefoot and had to work hard for us to get by, and now I want to connect his story with mine. I’m not here to get rich. I want to learn from this culture and use it in my cooking,” she says.
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When asked to describe her culinary style she says “It’s better if others describe my food. Of course, it results from my roots, my travels around the world, and all the kitchens I’ve worked in, but it’s hard to say how everything has influenced what I serve on the plate.”
It’s been anything but a straight road for Kaanache. After tiring of acting, she took a bus to Holland where she started making pintxos and other Basque dishes for different galleries. This turned into a successful catering business. “Then I saw a documentary with Heston Blumenthal and learned about all the famous chefs, such as Ferran Adrià. It completely engrossed me in their way of cooking, and I wanted to learn everything.”
First, she managed to land a spot in the kitchen of François Geurds, who was Heston Blumenthal’s right-hand chef for eight years. “He made my life miserable, but he taught me so much and I still thank him.” Empowered, in 2008, she wrote to some 40 Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide and started working in some of the finest kitchens in the US and Europe.
While working at The French Laundry in the Napa Valley, she got the chance to work with one of the world’s best chefs, Ferran Adrià of El Bulli. “I left everything and took the chance to work with him during the last two years that El Bulli was open. I learned so much from Ferran Adría; working at El Bulli is to find yourself, both as a chef and as a person,” she says. Her professionalism and personality eventually led to her being the one to close the doors of the iconic El Bulli on July 30, 2011.
The pilgrimage continued to different kitchens, and for four years she had a restaurant in Mexico City. Then she got a call that changed everything – again.
It was Stephen di Renza, Yves Saint Laurent’s close associate, who had a place in Fez he thought she should look at. “Everything felt right, but it was a big and important step for me, back to my roots but also a world and a society I had not lived in.”
When I sought Najat Kaanache to do this feature, she answered herself. No press officers, no firewalls. “I have never had a PR person to sell what I do. I prefer to do good things myself and then people will find me and my food. And it has worked – it probably takes longer, but that’s how I want it,” she says.
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In addition to Nacho Mama, a small Mexican restaurant she has opened in the same Fez medina, Kaanache recently opened Ziryab, a new restaurant in Seville named after a famous Arab poet, musician, and gastronome that specialises in Andalusian food. “I work constantly and spend most of my time on an aeroplane. But I have good teams in all my restaurants. They may not have gone to culinary school or have the right papers, but they know how to cook. It makes me happy,” she says.
During our discussion, she keeps returning to how, as a child, she was hungry and lay looking out at the starry sky each night. “It wasn’t primarily hunger for food,” laughs Kaanache. “It was more hunger to conquer the world and my biggest dream now is to open a restaurant on the moon. Maybe with the help of Elon Musk!”
As one of the few (although, a lot has happened in recent years) women in a world full of male chefs and restaurant owners, Kaanache is often invited to food festivals to talk about the role of women in the hospitality industry. It’s a topic she’s happy to discuss. “In Africa, it is the woman who decides in the kitchen, the woman who creates and cooks food. For me, who has worked in so many kitchens all over the world, being a woman has not been a problem. It has been more about me fighting and sacrificing so much as a person to constantly get better,” she says.
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Soon her third major cookbook will be released and there are always new plans that she is still secretive about.
The food at Nur is a three-hour journey through time and taste, where Moroccan cuisine is the basis but among the ten dishes, there are also Mexican, Asian, and even Nordic influences, all inspired by everything she learned on her journey.
The meal begins with Zalouk, a Moroccan mix of eggplant, tomatoes, garlic, and spices, followed by a croquette of fish and prawns with spices, garlic, prawn puree, and coriander. Another highlight is Kaanache’s famous chicken with Moroccan mole sauce and caramelized onions, caramelized raisins, chicken stock, freeze-dried pomegranates, popcorn, cocoa, orange marmalade, and lemon. “Some reviewer called it ‘modern Moroccan’. I don’t know. For me, it’s my food, the ideas that I’ve brought with me over the years. The Moroccan is perhaps the colours, the magic, and the mystery in this culture.”
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We return to the fact that it is time for the rest of the world to discover African food culture. Today, the closest Africa gets to Michelin credentials are two South African chefs — one in France and one in England — whose restaurants each have one star. There are also three South African restaurants on the list of the world’s 100 best restaurants. And that on a continent with 1.4 billion people.
“We are not poor and I know I speak for Africans in many countries, who want to be seen as human beings. There are so many exciting chefs across Africa that need to be discovered,” says Najat Kaanache.