Little Morocco Cafe: A Taste of Morocco in Vermont

Nov 06, 2025 0

Little Morocco Café, a restaurant that brings the rich flavors and cultural traditions of Morocco to Vermont, opened its doors on December 21. The restaurant is part of property owner Jacob Hinsdale's vision for the building located at 294 N. Winooski Ave, aiming to create high-traffic storefronts at street level.

A vibrant display of Moroccan dishes, showcasing the rich culinary heritage.

The People Behind the Flavors

The restaurant is owned by Karim Alamin, and the chef is Noha Yamani, who graduated from a culinary institute in Morocco and has taught culinary classes. She and Ramani - who was born in Fez, grew up in Marrakech and came to the United States in 1990 - both make the restaurant’s pastries.

According to Ramani, who worked as an assistant chef in Marrakech, there is no singular special dish at the Little Morocco Café. “Every item on the menu is a specialty,” he said, smiling.

Get a taste of Morocco!

Signature Dishes and Culinary Experience

If there is a signature dish of Morocco, it’s the lamb or chicken tagine, meats roasted with a variety of spices. On a recent Friday night I had the chicken tagine accompanied by a zaa zaa shake, a thick, subtly sweet concoction of walnuts, almonds, banana, avocado, raisins and dates.

I took a knife to the chicken tagine and quickly realized I didn’t need to; the tender flesh fell from the bone with the slightest touch. A few tart olives on top juiced up the flavor. An ample side dish of saffron rice - Ramani said it cooks in a variety of seasonings for six hours - was much more succulent than rice tends to be.

The atmosphere on this cold February night felt warm as I sat on a cushioned, pillow-laden bench in the dimly-lit dining room that seats 25 to 30 customers. A blend of traditional and pop music from Morocco played in the background; the food, the music and the evocative lanterns hanging from the ceiling combined to transport me from the Old North End to the medina for at least a few minutes.

The vibrant medina of Marrakech, inspiring the atmosphere of Little Morocco Cafe.

From Tagines to Kebabs

Little Morocco Café has a couple of sandwiches on its lunch menu but lets patrons order from its dinner menu, so I opted for the kefta kebab, three sausage-shaped rolls of spiced ground beef on a wooden skewer, with sides of French fries, rice and salad. The beef was light enough for a midday meal, and the dipping sauce - Ramani said it consists of homemade mayonnaise and yogurt and some “secret” spices - provided a nice textural and flavorful contrast. A pot of mint tea, sweet and smooth, soothed on a chilly February day.

Ramani said most of the restaurant’s spices come from Morocco and the organic meats from New York and Vermont. One of the key Moroccan flavors, he said, comes from packages of ras al hanout, a special mix of spices used in many Moroccan dishes.

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Community Reception and Future Prospects

Ramani said response from the community has been good. “Most people are experiencing a new taste,” he said. “The first impression when they walk in the door is, ‘It smells so good in here.’” He said he hopes to reach more potential diners.

The “sultan’s table” - which requires reservations and 48 hours’ notice, giving larger parties the chance to sample lavish three-, five- or seven-course meals at the dining room’s center table - has not yet caught on, according to Ramani. He hopes groups celebrating upcoming graduations will opt for that special meal.

“This is a table that has been famous in Morocco,” Ramani said. “It’s been in all the dynasties. This is how we would receive our guests, with a table like this.”

Ramani also expects to see Canadian tourists in the Little Morocco Café once they start coming south of the border this spring. Montreal has a substantial Moroccan population, and Ramani said Quebecois are already familiar with the cuisine.

Customers so far have been surprised by frequent offers of free food and drink - a cookie here or a spot of tea there - at the end of their meals, Ramani said. “This is what we do,” he said. “People find it very, very nice because they’re not used to that. This is Moroccan hospitality.”

A Look at a Similar Establishment: El Morocco

In 1943, Paul Aboody, who was the son of Lebanese immigrants, purchased a small barbershop in a three-decker house at 73 Wall Street on what is now called Grafton Hill in Worcester. Aboody, who had unsuccessfully tried running a number of small coffee shops around the city while working full-time at the Wyman-Gordon Company, used the former barber shop location to house a small restaurant on the first floor, which he named the El Morocco. His wife, Helen, made delicious pastries which quickly became popular with local residents. Despite its tiny size and the fact that patrons had to bring their own alcoholic drinks, the “El” became a well-known spot.

Within a short time, the “El” began to feature jazz musicians, which only added to its popularity. In 1945, the cellar of the building was dug out, which allowed eighty-five more patrons to visit. Soon entertainers from all over, who had performed in the city, would stop by after their shows. Over the years, famous patrons included Dolly Parton, Wayne Newton, Al Pacino, the Beach Boys, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Neil Sedaka, and Bette Midler, in addition to Worcester’s own Abbie Hoffman.

In 1972, Al Pacino, then a little-known actor, was in Worcester to attend a screening of his new movie and help promote it. The film was “The Godfather,” which became one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, and catapulted Pacino to stardom. The theater manager, Johnny Dee, took Pacino to the El Morocco after the screening for a party in his honor.

By 1976, business had grown tremendously, and a liquor license was finally secured. The new restaurant, although still popular, was never quite the same hot spot as the little place across the street. Late night parties and appearances by celebrities dropped off over time. As sometime happens in such cases, financial troubles began, despite business still being good-revenue in 1992 reportedly was more than $1 million. New owners made an attempt to open a restaurant/night club, named Il Palazzo, in January 2000, however by May of that year, an attempted robbery resulting in the murder of the manager effectively marked the end of operations. The building housing the original El Morocco was torn down in 2003.

Challenges and Controversies

Ali Amani received his lease renewal agreement last month, he was shocked. While residential and commercial rents in the Burlington area have risen dramatically over the past several years, the landlord, Hinsdale Properties, made it clear the goal was eviction. Amani discovered Hinsdale’s ambitions for a replacement tenant in September of last year when Hinsdale gave an unannounced tour of Little Morocco Cafe to a prospective renter: Sam Nelis, Barr Hill’s beverage director, was looking to open a bar.

Jacob Hinsdale is quick to frame the controversy over Little Morocco Cafe’s eviction-by-rent-hike as a case of a landlord stuck with a problem tenant. Prior to Little Morocco Cafe, up until 2018 the storefront space at 294 N Winooski Ave was rented by the Vermont Workers Center. The Workers Center shared the space with other organizations, including United Electrical Workers and Migrant Justice. Kanelstein said they only discovered Hinsdale’s plans to not renew their lease when he gave a prospective tenant an unannounced tour of the space.

“To me, it speaks to the fact that as long as we treat land and housing as private property, we’ll be stuck in this situation where landlords have power over us.” Kanelstein also noted that during the Workers Center’s move-out party at the end of their lease, Little Morocco Cafe staff volunteered and helped. Migrant Justice, which also rented office space elsewhere in the same building, opted to move with the Vermont Workers Center to its new location at S Winooski Ave and King St.

In 2019, the Off Center for the Dramatic Arts, which had shared the same building as the Workers Center, was denied the chance to renew its lease and had to scramble to find a new home. The Old North End continues to gentrify, and the fluctuations of the commercial real estate are both causes and effects of that shift.

Rental apartment buildings become condos, ethnic community-serving establishments are replaced with coffee shops and brew pubs, resident demographics become whiter and wealthier.

The Hinsdale Family History

Jacob Hinsdale, his sister Laura, and his mother Irene run Hinsdale Properties, a sprawling empire rooted in Burlington, with over 35 properties consisting of over 170 units of residential housing valued at over $30 million dollars. The first Hinsdales in America were early settler-colonists, starting with Deacon Robert Hinsdale, a man of high status in England, who arrived in the 1630s, shortly after the Mayflower.

The Hinsdales amassed land and influence in short order, with the patriarch becoming a man of “leading station in the colony” of Massachusetts, according to the Hinsdale family genealogy. Over the next three centuries, Hinsdale family members included the slave-owning Colonel Ebenezer Hinsdale, a mercantilist for whom the town of Hinsdale, New Hampshire is named. Hinsdale County, Colorado is named for George A. Hinsdale, Lt. Governor of Colorado in the 1850s. Senator from Kansas Preston Plumb and Lucy Kimball, who married Vermont-born Levi P.

The Hinsdale family’s Vermont history dates to the 1700s as farmers, mill owners, and landowners. In the early 1900s, Jacob’s grandfather Clark Hinsdale Sr., the son of farmers, married Marion Preston, the daughter of Burlington jewelers. The Preston family along with his parents’ financial support allowed Clark’s son, Clark Jr., to begin his career as a landlord, purchasing his first properties in the 1950s and 1960s. After a divorce, in 1991 he married his second wife, Irene, who had worked for him starting in 1977.

Currently, Jacob Hinsdale manages Hinsdale Properties, which has over $30 million in rental units, based on The Rake’s calculations of its publicly listed properties. He is married to Vermont State Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale, and they first met at a downtown revitalization development meeting, bonding over a shared interest in tiny homes. Sen. Ram Hinsdale is currently chair of the Senate committee that oversees housing and is the lead sponsor of the Housing Opportunities Made for Everyone (HOME) bill, which passed the Senate in late March.

Recent Developments

Public outrage appears to have put a wrench in Hinsdale Properties’ planned eviction of Little Morocco Cafe. Barr Hill’s Sam Nelis, the prospective new tenant, has backpedaled interest. His scheduled appearance before Burlington’s Development Review Board, for which he and Hinsdale Properties jointly submitted detailed operations and renovation documents for the North Winooski Ave space, was postponed at the last minute, with no new date set.

WHAT: Little Morocco CaféWHERE: 294 N. WORCESTER