The Slow Art of Cous Cous Cafe
- Hooriyah Kamran
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
How a Moroccan restaurant became an Oklahoma City sanctuary
The air inside Oklahoma City’s Cous Cous Cafe does not move with the frantic speed of a modern American restaurant. It slows down. The scent of roasted cumin, turmeric and slow-cooking lamb hangs heavy in the room, accompanied by a sense of peace.
For co-owner Rachid Ayare, the slow, deliberate atmosphere is not an accident of design; it is a philosophy.
“When a lot of people visit, when they enter here, they feel peace,” Ayare said. “You know, you are not in a rush. Cozy.”
In a food industry increasingly dominated by fast-casual efficiency, QR-code menus and high-turnover seating, Cous Cous Cafe has spent nearly two decades building the exact opposite, a sanctuary of ancient hospitality. But the journey from a local taxi driver’s dream to a beloved, award-winning pillar of the Oklahoma City culinary scene was a path defined by thin margins, cultural stubbornness and a single, sudden moment of grace that saved the business from vanishing entirely.
When Ayare first arrived in Oklahoma City, the local culinary landscape felt vast, yet empty. For a young man accustomed to the vibrant, spice-laden air of Morocco, the lack of familiar flavors was culture shock in its truest form.
“When we got here, there was no restaurant, no halal restaurant at all,” Ayare said. “So, usually we were cooking at home.”
To survive the culinary drought, Ayare took matters into his own hands, sourcing and processing meat for other Muslim families who had nowhere else to turn. “I saw the opportunity that I can have a butcher shop and a restaurant at the same time. So I decided to open a restaurant.”
From taxi to tangine
At the same time, Ayare was navigating through the roads of Oklahoma City from behind the wheel of a taxi cab. It was a job that placed him at the crossroads of a changing city, practically giving him a front-row seat to the desires of the people he ferried back and forth.
“The people there, the Americans especially, I used to take people to the airport. They would ask me why we don’t have, like, a Moroccan restaurant here," he said.
Hearing these stories from passengers sparked an idea. The local community was growing fast, and Oklahoma City was devoid of North African representation. The ultimate driver for his leap into business wasn’t just a passion for cooking. It was the thrill of new territory.
“It’s just the fact that I would be the first one to open a restaurant made me decide,” Ayare said.
In a market where African and Maghrebi cuisines were largely unfamiliar, many owners might have opted for a safer, broader label. Ayare refused to hide behind a generic label. His heritage was too central to his concept.
“The fact that it’s Moroccan. ... We didn’t put it like Mediterranean restaurant, so we add Moroccan to make us specific,” he explained.
Before transforming his family recipes into a business in 2007, Ayare’s only experience in professional American kitchens was working at the bottom of the ladder. “When I came, I worked as a busboy in a Pakistani restaurant,” he said.
When he and his business partner opened Cous Cous Cafe, the financial realities of running a restaurant became real. His partner took on the financial side of the business while Ayare managed the front of house and operations, but money was so tight that the restaurant operated nearly anonymously for its first few years.
“When I opened, we didn’t have, you know, enough money, to like, buy a sign,” Ayare said.
Ayare relied entirely on discovery. “Actually, we never marketed,” he said. “It’s just word of mouth.”
But word of mouth can be agonizingly slow. Cous Cous Cafe teetered on the edge of closure. Then, an ordinary day marked a turning point.
The community reacts
“There was a group of people who came to eat, and they brought with them alcohol, and I asked them to not do that, so they left. The local Muslim community heard about this from their faith leaders and thronged to support the restaurant.
Almost overnight, the restaurant found its footing, eventually spending years firmly atop regional categories across local city guides and restaurant blogs.
Ayare never stepped foot inside a formal culinary school, a rarity in Oklahoma. Instead, his education was built in the warmth of his childhood home in Morocco, raised by a family whose identity was indistinguishably linked to hospitality.
“My mom and also my family, they like to have guests,” Ayare said. “So I was raised in a family that has always wanted food. I would help them in the kitchen.” Every single item on the menu, Ayare noted, carries an echo of those childhood memories.
When it came time to build the menu for Cous Cous Cafe, his mother was the foundation. “In the beginning, it was my mom who helped me establish this,” Ayare said. But scaling home-cooked recipes to feed a growing clientele brought unexpected hurdles. Ironically, the dish that gave the restaurant its name proved to be the most difficult to perfect at a commercial volume.
“The specific technique or dish that was particularly difficult for me to master at a professional scale when I first started … it was couscous,” Ayare admitted.
To maintain rigorous standards without the shortcuts often taught in modern culinary schools, Ayare relies on a personal partnership. “I’m very lucky that my wife and my partner’s wife are the ones who do all the cooking," he said.
The secret ingredients
His wife brought her own specialized culinary training to the restaurant, particularly in baking. Traditional Moroccan desserts are heavily intertwined with French baking.
“Most Moroccan women, they know how to make, you know, especially the cookies and all that. The French-Moroccan cakes, you need to go to culinary school to learn it.” Ayare said. “My wife, she’s a pastry chef. So all the desserts are homemade, crafted completely from scratch.”
While many recipes remain entirely unaltered from how they have been prepared back home for generations, Ayare is aware of the demands of the American diners. The fast-paced environment of Oklahoma City meant the kitchen had to evolve.
“Some recipes we developed ourselves because the environment here is different,” Ayare explained. “The food needs to be quick. We need to serve it quick. So we developed some. But some of them we kept the same. Same as we have back home.”
Yet, even with these modifications, Ayare draws a hard line when it comes to compromising the soul of the food. One specific battle was the soup, harissa.
“Like, heavier soup,” Ayare said. “People said don’t, you know, make it like, for example, we put flour in it. But a lot of people said, why don’t you make it, you know, gluten free? But if you do it that way, you’re going to lose the consistency.”
For Ayare, altering the dish meant stripping it of its history.
“My philosophy in this just you stay, you know, faithful to the Moroccan flavor,” he said. “Let people decide, so I don’t do the opposite. Because otherwise, you’re going to be lost.”
The secret to keeping those authentic Moroccan flavors precise comes down to two things: fresh ingredients and patience.
“Just start from scratch,” Ayare revealed. “Most of it, we start from scratch. We don’t use any ready food. “To achieve this, the kitchen relies on raw, unaltered ingredients.”
But the ultimate hidden step in the kitchen, the one that dictates the final flavor above all else, is not spice. It is time.
“Patience,” Ayare said. “Be patient. You know, don’t rush it.”
This patience allows the restaurant to balance everyday Mediterranean staples with highly niche dishes. While everyday items like couscous are available constantly, the menu also makes room for delicacies typically reserved for special occasions. “We have one dish called Bastila. We do it only when we have weddings or we have a guest coming to your house. At Cous Cous, you can have it every day.”
It's also manifested in the newest addition to the menu, traditional lamb tangia, a slow- cooked masterpiece straight from Marrakech that cooks entirely inside a clay jar.
“What we put in yesterday, we serve it at 12, so it stays the whole night in a jar. So that’s what we are trying to, we do it every Friday, but today we moved it to Sunday to see if people, they like it.”
This dedication to timely methods is what Ayare believes separates true culinary heritage from passing food trends.
“It’s just like I said, when you are unique, you know, people they tend to, it’s like a habit,” he said. “It starts quick and disappears quick, but the traditional cuisines, they stay, you know, because they survive not only in the U.S., they survive thousands of years. The main thing is that we are keeping the consistency. We need to stay consistent. People, they come back and they want the same exact food.”
Belonging to Morocco and Oklahoma
While Ayare’s culinary roots belong to Morocco, his gratitude belongs firmly to Oklahoma. Over the last two decades, he has witnessed a profound change in the local palate. When he started, international food in OKC was largely limited to Mexican restaurants and establishments that introduced standard gyros.
Moroccan food was unheard of, and largely remains so across the region.
“For the Moroccan restaurants, there are not many,” Ayare said. “Even Dallas doesn’t have one. The whole of Texas, there is only one in San Antonio, and I think they closed. It’s a very hard business. We don’t have a big community to support you.”
Yet, Oklahoma City has proven to be unpredictable. Ayare attributes the city’s growing culinary adventurousness to a changing local demographic and a surprising health trend.
“I think the demographic of Oklahoma has changed a lot,” Ayare said. “People have moved, especially from California. And that really has helped these restaurants sustain.”
Simultaneously, a shift in American medicine began driving locals right to his doorstep. “The last 20 years, the doctors started asking customers to eat more vegetarian. And that survived. It’s just the balance. There’s a balance. You know, vegetables, Mediterranean food versus other, like for example, Italian, there’s a lot of pasta and stuff like that. A lot of calories.”
But numbers and demographics only tell half the story. The true uniqueness of the Oklahoma dining community lies in its character.
“The uniqueness about Oklahoma is when they try something and they like it, they stick to it,” he said. “You know, they are more loyal, if you want to say, customers. Compared with the other states, I never have. But that’s my feeling. People there, they become very loyal to you. And they like to know you.”
This loyalty was put to the test during the global pandemic of COVID-19, a crisis that affected thousands of independent restaurants across the country. For Cous Cous Cafe, the pandemic became a testament to the community they had spent years feeding.
“To tell you the truth, I mean, we were, we did good in COVID times,” Ayare revealed. “The support of our community, the community, I mean, the loyal customers, they were incredible. They kept us out and they supported us.”
For years, Cous Cous Cafe thrived as a cozy secret. But as the customer base began to grow, the physical limitations of the original restaurant size became impossible to ignore. The “hidden-gem” stage of the business had reached its limit. To meet the demand, Ayare and his partner made the decision to expand the restaurant directly into the adjoining retail space.
“The reason we put the size of the restaurant was our community,” Ayare said. “A lot of them, they like to make it to parties and stuff like that. So that was the main reason, and also, really, we saw growth.”
The expansion wasn’t just about adding more tables, it allowed them to build out vital back-of-house assets, including a walk-in cooler and freezer to support the volume of their scratch cooking.
But for the customers, the transformation was entirely atmospheric. The lighting shifted, enhancing the warm, welcoming mood. The expanded walls became a canvas for the restaurant's cultural heritage, featuring art that reflects Middle Eastern and African traditions.
Despite its enduring success, running an independent restaurant today presents a grueling set of new challenges. The post pandemic world has brought skyrocketing inflation and a shift in the workforce, making the day-to-day operations exhausting.
“Price,” Ayare said. “When today, if you want to open the same restaurant, you need a double of what we spent when we started. More than that, I would say.”
Beyond the sheer cost of goods, the labor market has transformed too. As the world digitizes, the physically demanding reality of hospitality work has lost its appeal for many younger workers.
“That’s the problem. See, a restaurant is very, it’s very demanding,” Ayare said. “Like you saw me now standing there. You know, you can not leave customers waiting or something. You need to be, and that’s labor these days. There is not enough labor. Moved online, and also, the kind of employees that we used to know, they are not, they don’t have the same ethics and stuff like that like we used to be.”
Looking toward the next five to 10 years, Ayare hopes to see the Oklahoma City international food scene continue to diversify, particularly within Middle Eastern and Arab cuisines, which he feels are deeply underrepresented in America.
"We don't see a lot of Mediterranean cuisine in America," he said. "It's bad. Turkish restaurant, for example. You know, Egyptian restaurant. We don't see something like that. As a community starts growing of a certain country, then their cuisine will appear."
While he notes that technology and social media have created a rapid “hype cycle” that helps new restaurants find fast fame, he is skeptical of its longevity. Cous Cous Cafe once tried social media marketing, but the results didn’t match the power of word of mouth. While he is open to exploring digital growth in the future, and even the dreams of opening a smaller, low-maintenance fusion sandwich shop geared toward a younger demographic, his allegiance remains to the timeless and the traditional.
For Ayare, a restaurant owner's role goes far beyond the kitchen doors. As a prominent Muslim business owner, he views hospitality as a form of community service and quiet diplomacy, frequently reaching out to other faith communities during difficult times.
"It's always good to give back," he says.
Ultimately, the hard worked hours and economic pressures fade away when a customer takes their first bite.
Connection through food
"I wonder that when people are eating, they are happy, you know," Ayare said. "And you want to see that happiness in their face. And those compliments, it's the one that drives you. When you have a good food, it makes people wonder, you know, and they start like they want to know more about your culture. Food is art. And the art and the food, they are the language that can break the wall between different nations. The food is the language that makes nations know each other.”
For those who stand on the sidelines of the restaurant industry, hesitant because of the financial risks and daunting likelihood of failure, Ayare offered a final piece of advice.
"They need just to start, you know," he said. "Don't think too much, you know, on how they are going to do it or something or what people they think. They need to do it in smaller scale so they will not like kill themselves financially. Like we said, the faith in what they are doing and the rest is just going to be history."
Ayare’s long-term goal for the restaurant is less about expansion and more about cultural preservation within the Oklahoma City business community. For him, the ultimate measure of success after nearly two decades in business remains a matter of cultural integrity.
"We hope to, you know, represent Morocco the right way," Ayare concluded.