Inspired by the film CASABLANCA, former U.S. diplomat Kathy Kriger set out to re-create the film’s iconic gin joint as a restaurant in Morocco. Here’s how she became "Madame Rick."
It's a gorgeous, cloudless June day in Casablanca, and a maintenance crew from the local electric company is preparing to dig up the street in front of my elegant water- -front restaurant. Their timing is impeccable. Rick’s Café is about to begin lunch service, and my guests will have to maneuver around piles of broken cement to get into the restaurant. “Ce n’est pas grave, Madame. C’est le Maroc. Il faut adapter,” the foreman tells me. (“This is not serious, Madame. This is Morocco. One must adapt.”) I want to tell him that if there’s one thing I’ve learned while living in Morocco, it’s that adapting would be the worst possible mistake. Seven years ago, I set out to turn Rick’s Café Américain, the iconic gin joint in the movie Casablanca, into a reality, and if I’d adapted every time someone told me something couldn’t be done, the place would still be a celluloid fiction. Instead, I tell the crew firmly to move elsewhere until lunch is over. The men roll up the yellow tape and take their jackhammers to another area. “They didn’t even look up when I was trying to get them to stop,” says my maintenance chief as he follows me back into the restaurant.Of course, he didn’t have Bogie as his inspiration—or at least Rick, the character Humphrey Bogart played in the movie. Like many fans, I’d imagined that Rick’s Café was real, but when I was posted to Casablanca in 1998 as
commercial attaché for the U.S. Consulate General, I discovered that the place was a 1943 Hollywood fantasy. Warner Brothers had built the entire set, using hundreds of photos of Moroccan-style buildings, street scenes and costumes for inspiration. The idea of creating a real Rick’s crossed my mind—I love cooking and entertaining, and had racked up some entrepreneurial experience before entering the foreign service—but instead I threw myself into my diplomatic work, helping American companies do business with Morocco. And I fell in love with the country.
Casablanca is a complex city with some rough edges—noise, traffic, pollution, poverty—and its charms are secret and subtle: Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture in the town’s center; fragrant spice and food markets. The cuisine is one of the most refined in the world, and the people’s hospitality is legendary. Morocco is also known for its religious tolerance. Although it’s a Muslim country, women are free to dress as they wish, and in Casablanca, Western fashion prevails.
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