07/18/2026
Thank you T: The NYTimes Style Magazine The New York Times for shaThe New York Timesd thank you to everyone who’s made it one worth telling. 43 years and counting! 💗
“When Rivka Orlin and her brother Yosi Ohayon opened Café Mogador at
101 St. MCafé Mogadorn 1983, she named it for their hometown on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Known as Essaouira since the mid-20th century, the seaport was called Mogador by 15th-century Portuguese conquerors. The word is believed to be a take on an older Berber name meaning “safe anchorage.”
Around the time Cafe Mogador opened, most of the food you’d find in the East Village was Eastern European. Mogador was believed to be the first North African restaurant in the neighborhood, and one of just a few in the city. “I cooked from memory of what my mother did in the kitchen at home” says Orlin. She served dishes like eggplant with labneh, tagines and shakshuka. “These were things people didn’t know yet,” she says.
More than 40 years on, Cafe Mogador still offers many of those items and an easy charm to the diverse lot of diners who stream in for a late breakfast, or lunch or dinner, filling the wooden banquettes and bright red chairs at the small tables or the blue stools at the bar.”
