Restaurant Review: Café Mogador, Williamsburg

Restaurant Review: Café Mogador, Williamsburg

A great neighborhood gem, but there’s something strange going on here…

I’ve eaten at Café Mogador plenty of times since finding out about it around six months back. The food is phenomenal Moroccan fare from top to bottom, but there’s something amiss about this Williamsburg staple. No, I don’t think Moroccans are trying to take over the United States by way of small local restaurants spreading their influence from coast-to-coast. I don’t even think Moroccan food contains illicit drugs laced to try and brainwash patrons into doing the bidding of the restaurant's owners, I mean, how else could the food be so good? The issue I have with Café Mogador has nothing to do with the restaurant itself, the wonderful food, the well-trained and friendly staff, or their plots on world domination—It has to do with their clientele.

The following is a list of things I should never have to put up with when eating a meal:

• Overly animated and rambunctious conversations well above crowd noise level
•  Loud and offensive language
• A ‘private’ conversation meant for a dinner-mate held well above a personal noise level about the size of your boat, car, apartment, or anything that would lead me to believe the size of your appendage is being compensated by it
• Deep tonguing, French kissing, throating, or any other form of sticking a part of your body inside another person’s body
• Slamming down your American Express Platinum Card with considerable flourish that it almost bounces off your table onto mine
• Fights with significant others
• A table that obviously has a prior engagement to get to and has no time even thinking about sitting down for a meal at any restaurant other than McDonalds

All of these are things that I have seen at Café Mogador the past three times I’ve eaten there. It’s a shame, it really is, because the food is so damn good but the patrons are so miserably bad. I truly pity a staff that has to try and push out a meal that takes time and skill to prepare to a table that will obviously miss whatever event they’re heading to—the amount of attitude they got for taking a reasonable amount of time to put out a tagine was sad. I also feel bad for our waiter and runner who had no idea how to handle the customers sitting next to me tongue-fucking on their two top. The coarse language, loud and obnoxious customers, even self flattery, I can deal with—there is a special place in restaurant hell for customers like that, but when did proper manners and dining etiquette escape a large part of the public? It took all of my constraint not to tap the man sitting to my left on the shoulder politely and tell him to remove his fucking tongue out of his girlfriend’s mouth and deal with their fight somewhere other than a public place. No one should ever have to deal with that where they’re paying well for a service. It’s not a refundable offense because it has nothing to do with the restaurant, but it does make them look bad. Where can restaurants draw the line? Do they have the right to break up an audible fight between a couple and tell them to take it to the street? Do they have the right to pour a bucket of cold water over a couple tangled in intimacy over their couscous? If they don’t, someone else eating in their restaurant will, and things might be slightly less ordered if that happens.

Photo Via http://www.etiquetteoutreach.com

This brings me to golf. Golf is a game of patience and protocol that can quickly test those who play it in both their tolerance for disappointment and their character and manners. Golf has an unwritten list of rules, laws really, that are followed to a tee because that’s the way that it’s done. No one’s loud, no one uses profanity, at least in earshot, no one gets angry and throws a club, and no one forgets to rake the sand trap after their triple bogey. Everyone is kind, gentle, knows the order of who takes the next shot, knows where to stand, and knows where to take a drop if their ball finds the water. They all know to let a fast group of two play through their group of four. They all know to step over or completely navigate around the line of someone else’s putt. They know how to replace a divot and fix a ball’s depression in the green. This makes things easy when getting ready to go for a round of golf—every trip should be the same. In a perfect world, every golfer will act exactly the same way and know exactly how to conduct themselves. In practice, this still doesn’t hold true, but more times than not, the outing goes precisely the way it should.

Photo Via http://www.golfcamp.com

There is such a thing as restaurant etiquette, though I feel it’s sometimes lost. This is something I truly lament over. Maybe there will come a day when this all changes, when casual dining is held in the same manner as classy dining. Maybe that’s why the allure of elegant dining hasn’t eluded me yet—yes, it costs a pretty penny, but perhaps the price is reflected in their orderly dining rooms and well behaved customers. This might make me sound like a douche bag, but I’d gladly pay a little extra for my food not to deal with a cursing man, a crying baby, or sex on the table. Either this, or diners now have to start wearing training collars when the go out to eat. Much like a bark collar for dogs, the owners of the restaurant can inflict serious pain to their customers when they get out of hand or act like assholes. Drop the F-bomb? Shock. Getting a little too touchy under the table? Shock. Bad tip? Shock. It’s this type of negative reinforcement that I can get on board with.

Photo Via http://lauby.blogspot.com

Oh, and the food at Café Mogador was great, and I will continue to go there despite all that I wrote above. Get the fish tagine—it was amazing.

- Adam at Tipped Mixology