Fine Dining You Can Eat With Your Hands: Chef Mourad’s Exclusive Touch-Inspired Dinner

Food is as universal as it is a personal experience. Everyone eats, but we all perceive food differently through our senses. No one understands this better than the team at the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD). Inspired in part by their sensory-centric approach to exploring food, we are pleased to extend an invitation to our six-part dinner series — Feast for the Senses — that explores food through the five senses. At each dinner, a renowned chef will design a menu inspired by a sense.

Five Senses. Six Dinners. Endless Possibilities.

Feast for the Senses comes to San Francisco on November 11, with a specially designed meal exploring touch by chef Mourad Lahlou at his downtown Moroccan-inspired restaurant Mourad.

The family-style dinner will highlight Lahlou’s signature combination of Moroccan influences and a modern sensibility in a private mezzanine at Mourad’s high-design space in the beautifully Art Deco Pacific Telephone building. His specialties include a classic lamb shoulder, but cooked sous vide rather than slow roasted. The stewed chicken isn’t served with lemons and olives but instead brined in them, then roasted and served with a crackly, crispy skin. And he serves everything family-style, food you explore with your hands.

Chef Lahlou came to the United States from his native Morocco to study economics at Cal State San Francisco. Feeling homesick, he started cooking his mother’s recipes. His food was good. He began feeding friends and professors.With his brother, he opened a restaurant in Marin County. Then they opened one in Outer Richmond, called Aziza, after their mother. In 2010, Aziza won a Michelin star. This year, he opened his bigger, brighter downtown showpiece, which takes things further back to his family roots with family-style service.

Join Lahlou for this culinary experience on November 11. It’s at Mourad, at 140 New Montgomery Street. Dinner starts at 6 p.m. Tickets for this family-style feast are $50 per person.

Photo Credit: Eric Wolfinger