Moro
In the early 1990s, Samantha Clarke was introduced to Samuel Clark through mutual friends, eventually married and become Sam and Sam Clark. Following their tenure at what is considered the first gastropub in England, The Eagle in Farringdon, the couple worked with Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at the River Café. Taking a sabbatical to travel around the Mediterranean and North Africa they picked up influences, styles, flavours and philosophies to bring back and establish their first restaurant, Moro in 1997 – a time London was relatively scarce on such fusions and Moro’s take on Moorish cuisine was contemporary and fresh.
With Mark Sainsbury and Jake Hodges they launched the restaurant in a previously unoccupied supermarket space in Exmouth Market, which up until the 1990s was seedy wasteland neither here nor there, between Clerkenwell and Bloomsbury. In that decade a number of architects, publishers and media outlets including The Face and the Guardian arrived. They all went to Moro for lunches and dinners, making the restaurant a backdrop for a part of London’s edgy and creative culture of that time. Moro's innovative approach was swiftly recognized, securing the title of the best new restaurant of 1997 by Time Out, followed by the BBC Good Food Best Restaurant Award in 1998.
