When I first arrived in France, I expected a culinary déjà-vu; the sauces, the breads, the rituals, all looked familiar on paper.
What surprised me wasn’t the taste. It was the way food was imagined as a public act and designed as if it were a civic service. In Morocco, feeding students and feeding cities is a visible, pragmatic choreography, public structures such as ONOUSC run university restaurants across the kingdom, private caterers such as Newrest Maroc shape large swathes of practical capacity, and specialist local consultancies and engineering teams step in to translate ambition into working kitchens.
That map of a mix of public commitment and private scale felt at once comforting and brittle, a beautiful improvisation held together by people who know how to make things work with what they have.
In France the choreography felt different. Here, bodies of work such as owners’ advisors (AMO), operational design firms (MOE), institutions like CROUS, and specialist consultancies, separate duties carefully and early. It is less improvisation, more division of labor; less “we’ll make it work tonight,” more “let’s define who will be responsible for the pump, the spare parts, the acceptance tests.”
During my internships I watched this play out in real time, consulting companies shaping the brief, negotiating the social and political aims of a project, doing the technical drawings that would decide whether a service corridor became a bottleneck or a lifeline. That split is not just jargon. It is a philosophy of caring about what people eat, that care must be reflected in the plans, roles and measurable responsibilities.
Improvisation and foresight
Both systems aim for the same result – dignified, reliable feeding at scale – but they translate it through different logics. Morocco’s system leans on rapid scale-up by private operators. Newrest Maroc, for example, operates at vast scale, production units in Casablanca, Marrakech and Rabat, airport concessions, hundreds of sites and hundreds of thousands of meals every day. That private backbone can deploy resources quickly, creating a national reach that public institutions alone might struggle to fund. Yet speed and scale can mask fragile seams, when maintenance, spare parts or local training aren’t fully budgeted, the beautiful service on opening day can become costly to sustain.
France, by contrast, institutionalized the invisible work. Consultants argue over corridor widths; engineers specify access panels and service hatches; managers schedule acceptance tests and maintenance calendars before the first plate is plated. The French appetite for process is visible in market-level dynamics too, the traditional restaurant sector is vast and atomized, tens of thousands of establishments with diverse formats and a rising share of networks and chains. That market structure, a strong tradition of small independents alongside organized groups, intensifies the need for rigorous design and operational clarity in every segment, including collective catering.
I felt awe and a mild cultural shock. As a Moroccan student, I loved the way my country’s kitchens invent themselves nightly and teams learn routes, shortcuts and makeshift fixes that keep service moving when budgets are tight. That improvisational intelligence is a kind of craft of local producers who supply what’s seasonal, caterers who convert mass into meaning, engineers who adapt imported equipment to local realities. At the same time, the French approach taught me the dignity of foresight, the quiet assurance that systems won’t fail because someone somewhere has already planned the night-time fix. This dual lesson “make do, and make durable” began to shape the way I saw design.
Different structures
A concrete example made it stick. At one French pre-opening, a tester checking burners was shadowed . In FOH everything was picture-perfect; in BOH tiles still dusted, engineers repeating checklists. The seamless guest experience depended on many invisible actors like suppliers, installers, a consultant who could sign off on the HVAC configuration, a contractor who had actually ordered the right flue. That sign-off culture, acceptance, paperwork, clear lines of responsibility is the scaffolding behind the show.
At home, I had learned another scaffolding, a central production kitchen feeding entire regions, or private operators, such as Ansamble, building trusted school-canteen programs that parents rely on. The difference was not moral; it was structural. Morocco’s resilience often depends on people improvising; France’s resilience often depends on roles that prevent improvisation from becoming necessary.
Design choices are not aesthetic trivia. They are human choices about how people will move, how they will be protected, how invisible labor will be valued. A corridor that’s 20 centimeters too narrow may seem innocent on a blueprint; in a busy shift it can create a pinch point that increases time per dish, stress, and risk.
French consultancies emphasize granularity in their contracts, programmatic briefs, ergonomic modeling, maintenance access, spare-part lists. Moroccan consultancies are equally capable on the technical side, they produce feasibility studies, optimize equipment lines, collaborate with international architecture firms, but often under different budgetary, regulatory and supply-chain constraints. The practical result is a constant negotiation: the best projects take the precision of a French AMO/MOE split and the resourceful pragmatism of Moroccan implementation.
Asking the quiet questions
There is also a business story playing out. Festivals and trade events, such as Marrakech’s CREMAI, are scaling up as platforms for innovation and cross-border exchange. CREMAI 2025 gathered hundreds of brands, thousands of professionals and a push to position Morocco as a hospitality hub for Africa and the Middle East. These moments matter, they accelerate knowledge transfer, showcase equipment and techniques, and create networks that blur the borders between improvisation and formal design. They can be the crucible where Moroccan operators learn French standards and where French firms learn local ingenuity.
A market analyst’s note reminds us the stakes are high The traditional restaurant sector in France is enormous and fragmented, made up of tens of thousands of outlets, pressures from new concepts and staffing challenges and that context pushes operators to professionalize operations and order their internal roles. When the market pushes complexity, the discipline of planning pays off. Yet the same pressures exist in Morocco, where growth, consolidation and private investment (acquisitions and new entrants) are accelerating the need for robust operational models and strong technical partners. In both countries, the winners will be the teams that combine technical foresight with human-centered flexibility.
If you ask me what changed me most during my internships, I will say that I learned to ask the quiet questions. Who will replace the pump at midnight? Where will the spare parts be stored? Which worker will do repetitive lifting, and how can the layout protect their back? Those operational micro-questions are the true measures of design success. They are the small human things that determine whether employees feel respected and whether systems last beyond the sparkle of opening day.
I also learned the value of travel as a professional practice. Crossing between Moroccan kitchens and French consultancies taught me to hold two glossaries at once, the improviser’s glossary (adapt quickly, honor local supply, invent rituals), and the engineer’s glossary (define roles, specify access, measure uptime). A good designer, especially a young one, should master both. That ability to translate between systems is where I want to place my work in designing kitchens that honor local flavors and practices, while embedding specifications that protect people and operations.
There are practical things I now do differently. In design reviews I insist on a maintenance clause. In project meetings I show necessity of the presence of the local operator when plans are signed, because they know the local supply constraints and labor patterns. When I see plans for student canteens I look for procurement logic” is the menu seasonal? Are the dishwashers serviceable? Is the catering model centralized or decentralized? In Morocco, a national vision (like ONOUSC’s network) and large private operators (like Newrest) shape procurement differently than in France, where CROUS and a patchwork of public and private players create a different tendering and specification environment. Understanding those market mechanics is as useful as understanding the mixer schedule.
Finding a direction
In Morocco and France alike, projects that budget for spare parts, training and clear handover procedures are the ones that honor dignity for staff and for guests. The politics of feeding people are technical problems in disguise; they ask for design that respects people over the long haul.
I do not have decades of stories. I have the fresh hunger of a student who has sat at opening-night huddles and at canteen tables. I have learned to read the silhouette of a kitchen where a service corridor breathes, where a prep line tells a story of seasonality, where a maintenance hatch reveals whether someone thought about the future.
Between couscous and carte étudiante I found my direction, not towards one system, but towards synthesis, to design in way that combines Morocco’s resourceful heart with France’s disciplined backbone.
I urge all students and young consultants entering this field to travel between kitchens. Spend a day in a central production unit in Casablanca and a another on a MOE drawing table in Paris. Shadow a maintenance technician for an afternoon and a program manager for a morning. Ask the small questions that nobody asks when the cameras are on. Those are the questions that keep the lights on, the food warm, and the dignity of the people who feed us intact.
I came to France hungry for taste and found, too a taste for systems, the idea that a meal is not only a plate but a promise. Design the promise well, for the staff, for the student, for the city and the meals will taste better for it.
Nada Fati
