CHAMEAU
Silver Lake’s best-kept secret gets an extreme makeover and relocates to the Fairfax District

I don’t like being hit over the head with clichés while I’m eating. I don’t like belly dancers, and my fascination with hookahs ended in the ‘90s. That’s why I like Chameau as much as I do. This jewel box of a restaurant doesn’t look or feel like other Moroccan restaurants. It doesn’t grossly exploit cultural stereotypes to make its point.

Hints of Morocco introduce themselves slowly at Chameau. An elegant camel makes a silhouetted appearance on the back wall (chameau is the French word for camel). Gorgeous gold-leaf and jewel-toned water glasses provide another clue, followed by mosaic bread plates (served with homemade loaves) and saucers of olives, preserved lemon dip and eggplant spread. Delve
into an appetizer of lamb cheeks, and you will be transported halfway around the world. Dabbled with a light Dijon glaze, these cheeks are fantastically musky, almost gamey, as if they came from mutton rather than lamb.
Kelly Klemovich and Adel Chagar have opened a wonderfully modern French-Moroccan cafe in the heart of an eclectic stretch of Fairfax, just down the street from Canter’s. If the name sounds familiar but the address seems wrong, that’s because Chameau originated four years ago in Silver Lake, in a cramped and shabby space with refrigerators in the dining room. They served dinner only, three nights a week, which always seemed like strange hours for a restaurant, but they never intended it to become a restaurant. They rented that space because they needed a kitchen for their catering business, and somehow it just evolved into one of L.A.’s best-kept secrets with a fiercely loyal clientele.

On the surface, the new digs don’t appear much bigger (with room for only 54 seats), but the kitchen has quadrupled and, aesthetically, this is another world completely. Designed by Suhail, a Pakistani Englishman based in Chicago who goes by just the one name, the restaurant is a breath of fresh air for L.A.’s homogeneous scene. (In addition to designing some of Chicago’s hottest restaurants, Suhail is best known for creating the house/set for MTV’s The Real World, Chicago.) Though the restaurant occupies a tiny store f ront, the designer’s imprint is large. There is no artwork, per se. But there is no shortage of interesting visuals—one wall is textured like windblown sand drifts, along with a sliver of mural that, if you squint, looks like camels in a storm. Sort of. The opposite wall is carpeted with saturated stripes that match a series of vibrant, box-like lanterns. And if this is any indication, it looks like linoleum floors are making a comeback.

Klemovich and Chagar met—and began dating—while working at Paramount studios. He was a chef; she worked in events and marketing. Klemovich is the one out front, the one with the bubbly personality. Chagar, somewhat shy and gruff, stays mostly in the kitchen. Chagar grew
up in Rabat, the capital of Morocco—formative years that would later p rovide inspiration for Chameau. And though he’s worked in the kitchens of The Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons, he makes no attempt at froufrou cuisine
here. He does, however, insist on creating everything from scratch, even (especially) the couscous, which he makes by rubbing semolina flour between wet hands until the friction creates millions of sand-like grains, which he quickly blanches and then spreads out to dry for 24 hours. Behindthe- scenes complexity aside, this is fairly straightforward cooking from a delicious, somewhat untapped corner of the world.

Morocco’s most familiar dishes like bastilla and tagine are wellrepresented without being clichéd. Bastilla is traditionally made by wrapping a mixture of slow-cooked pigeon and almonds in a tightly wound phyllo package. Chagar makes do with duck, whose deliciously perfumed meat he stacks loosely, Napoleon-style, between two crispy disks of warka dough, which he dusts the traditional way with powdered sugar and cinnamon, but he also drizzles a port-and-honey reduction on the side. Tagines are stews cooked and served in conical clay pots of the
same name—the tagine of beef short ribs is terrific.

The one food I look forw a rd to above all others in every Moroccan restaurant I visit is m e rg u e z, an intensely flavored sausage that comes in very small packages, a fitting metaphor for Chameau itself, so I was especially
eager to try Chagar’s. He makes his simply with ground organic lamb and M o roccan red chile sauce called harissa. An admirable attempt, but the merguez falls flat, probably because it is forced to play a supporting role to
baked goat cheese. Theoretically, the cheese should be a soothing counterpoint to the attention-grabbing sausage, not the other way around.

But where the sausage falls short, the sardines pick up the slack. Few chefs on this side of the Atlantic feel compelled to serve sardines. Chagar does, and his are sublime. He butterflies the bait-sized fish, dusts them with flour and fries them until golden and crisp—tails still intact—and serves them with chermoula, a spreadable chutney made from garlic, lemon, paprika and cilantro.

This being a Moroccan restaurant, lamb naturally outnumbers everything else on the menu. I enjoyed a wonderful kidney-stuffed saddle of lamb. Skewers of lamb were good, too. But best of the lot were big hefty chops from lamb raised on a farm near San Francisco, char-grilled and served with a relish of preserved lemons and black olives.

Olives came into play again with a wonderful chicken dish, a whole baby chicken splayed across the plate as if run over by a truck on a desert highway, deliciously slathered with red chile sauce, grilled and topped with a slurry of salty green olives and a squirt of yogurt sauce for balance. Every dish seems to come with a little surprise not divulged on the menu. With the lamb skewers, beets appeared; with the monkfish, a curry-like sauce; with the chicken, a spinach and heirloom tomato salad instead of “herb salad” as promised.

Most of the waitstaff migrated from the Silver Lake location, and service couldn’t be more sincerely warm and pleasant. But come 9PM or later when the restaurant is bursting at the seams, service tends to fall apart. Waiters turn up missing for 20 minutes at a time. Dirty plates linger longer than they should. This is when it becomes crystal clear which customers are regulars (they’re the ones who don’t notice) and which are the newbies (the
ones impatiently trying to pay their checks). It’s an understandable blip, considering the drastic difference between then and now.

Desserts are very hit or miss. A delicious chocolate apricot tart was as dense and rich as Jessica Simpson, but the “bastilla au lait” was quite awful, a strawberry shortcake masquerading as bastilla with unripe berries. Mint tea
is good, made with fresh mint and verbena leaves and green tea, served in a hammered silver pot with a potholder in the shape of what looks like—dare
I say it?—an adorable little slave. Or maybe I’m just interpreting it wrong, much the same way I had trouble “seeing” the camel’s eyelash that is the focal point of the ceiling. Another tongue-in-cheek re f e rence to Morocco, this is a big hairy ripple with bulbous lips on either side that spans half of the ceiling. It’s hard to miss. But a camel’s eyelash? If you ask me, it looks more
like a camel toe. Eyelash or toe? You decide.

~BY BRAD A. JOHNSON

CHAMEAU: 339 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., 323.951.0039 HOURS: Tues.–Sun., 6–10PM WHO’S THERE: Silver Lake artists, Fairfax retirees, UCLA romantics and Westside self-parkers WHERE TO SIT: The big, comfy booths are often reserved for parties of six on weekends but during the week can usually accommodate smaller groups WHERE TO PARK: Did you know it’s OK to park in a loading zone after 6PM? And there’s a loading zone space
directly in front of the restaurant ABOUT THE BAR: Beer and wine only, with a very interesting one-page list featuring hard-to-find boutique wines, plus a couple of decent bottles from Morocco NOISE LEVEL: About 85
decibels, which is about the same as a vacuum cleaner—annoying but never too loud for normal conversation WHAT IT COSTS: Appetizers, $8–11;
entrées, $18–25; desserts, $6 RATING: (on a 5-star scale):

What the stars mean:
1 = fair, some noteworthy qualities;
2 = good, above average;
3 = very good, well above norm;
4 = excellent, among the area’s best;
5 = world class, extraordinary in every detail.

Reviews are based on multiple visits and reflect the reviewer’s overall reaction to food, ambience and service.