Business of the Month: Café Mogador, 101 St. Mark’s Place
Your input is needed! Today we feature our latest Business of the Month — help us to select the next. Tell us which independent store you love in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo: click here to nominate your favorite. Want to help support small businesses? Share this post with friends.
People who romanticize the East Village of the 1970s and early 1980s overlook issues that made life in the neighborhood at the time particularly challenging. Most notably, it had not a single Moroccan restaurant. This dire situation was remedied and then some by the arrival in 1983 of our May Business of the Month, Café Mogador (101 St. Mark’s Place, btw 1st Ave. and Ave. A), a beloved local establishment that features delicious homestyle North African delicacies in a setting that offers, at once, the comforts of home and the exoticism of far away.
Rivka Orlin fell in love with the 1970s East Village during visits from her native Mogador (today, Essaouira, Morocco). Her husband and brother had moved into the neighborhood and opened Café Orlin, a bohemian hangout renowned for its Middle Eastern Breakfast. She loved its small-town feel and the cosmopolitanism and eccentricities of its denizen (and she still does!). She would help run the new restaurant during her trips. And then in 1981, she moved over for good and made the East Village her home.
A couple of years later, a space became available one block down, at a former Hare Krishna storefront, and she and her brother decided to open a second place, Café Mogador. This new five-table establishment would offer many of the dishes that Ritva’s mother would prepare for her and her eleven siblings back in Mogador. It was a gamble. The area was hardly a dining destination. For one, it barely had any restaurants. For another, visitors were too intimidated by the neighborhood’s reputation to wander that past 1st Avenue. And then on top of that, few knew what Moroccan food even was. But it was not an expensive gamble. Rents were cheap. So the siblings forged ahead.
Café Mogador survived its first few years, despite seldom having more than one table at a time to serve. Its secret? Very low overhead. Rivka did everything herself. She essentially lived at the restaurant. (Not just metaphorically; her residence was above the eatery). While her son Rafael played or did homework off in the corner, she cooked, waited tables, cleaned, and generally kept the place afloat by dint of hard work. In 1986, the barbershop next door closed, and Rivka and her brother decided to expand the restaurant and give it another year to catch on. It did. And the reason it did is that Rivka had a trick other than low overhead up her sleeve: great food.
The tagine alone is an institution. The savory/briny/sweet/aromatic complexity of this traditional slow cooked stew will smack you in the face and make you beg for more. The bastilla is a celebration, a stuffed phyllo pie that disorients the senses by colliding the flakey against the tender and the savory against the sweet (and by evoking medieval European cooking, for those who remember). Add to those the mezze, and you’ll want to dine there every evening. Add the Middle Eastern breakfast and the Sabich sandwich, and you’ll want to eat there every meal. If you decide, however, to also linger in between meals (and basically move in), you’ll have the restaurant’s charming atmosphere and welcoming staff to thank.
The formula behind Café Mogador warmth and lived-in charm is deceptively simple. It consists, first of all, of a staff so carefully selected that its members stick around for decades and become part of the family. Otherwise, it stems from the combination of flea market finds, old family pictures, decorative embellishments by relatives, soft overhead lighting, and old North African and French music played at conversation-friendly levels (YOU HEAR THAT, NEW YORK CITY RESTAURANTS). But it took someone of Rivka’s sensibilities to put it all together. The result makes you feel like you’re visiting a distant, free-spirited aunt whom you seldom see, because she lives abroad, but who regales you with fascinating stories about her life whenever you do. And many must like that feeling, because, for several decades and counting, Café Mogador has been a perennial favorite among both neighbors and visitors.
That count almost came to a stop during the COVID pandemic, when Rivka fell sick and could no longer operate the restaurant. Her second son Danny and her nephew Jacob Ahiyon, who had also grown up hanging out at the restaurant but who, like his cousin, had never expressed any interest in running it, surprised her by offering to step in. She gladly accepted and not just because the alternative might have been to shut down. And the new arrangement worked. It worked so well that Rivka let them eventually take control of the restaurant and eased her way into a well-earned retirement (which doesn’t mean that you won’t regularly find her here).
Asked to look back on her career and explain why she stuck it out and why she’s still here today, Rivka had this to say:
I like the social part, you know? I mean, I live in the neighborhood. I come here every day for lunch. I see the workers, the family, a lot of regular customers. It’s like my second home! If you want to be in the restaurant business, you need to like socializing. I like to hang out with people! The struggle was a struggle. It’s a miracle that we stayed here. It wasn’t easy. And for me, especially, I was a single mother, and I didn’t have much money to put back in the business. So I had to like to live a very, very frugal life. But now, I’m in the moon! I don’t have to work. And this place gives me a lot of pleasure. I love to walk in here, sit in the bar, have a drink, hang out, eat something good, and get all the praise from people that love this place. People love this place! And that gives me a lot of satisfaction.
For over four decades of evoking and reciprocating its customers’ love, we’re thrilled to name Café Mogador our May, 2026 Business of the Month.
What special small business would you like to see featured next? Just click here to nominate our next one. Thank you! #shoplocalnyc
Here is a map of all our Businesses of the in Month: