Mohamed “Momo” Farouq, a Morocco-born pizzaiolo who earned acclaim in Como, Italy, with Pizzeria Cardamomo, is moving his celebrated restaurant across the Atlantic and to the other side of the United States—all for the love of an American woman.
Farouq originally partnered with Alessandra Giannelli to open Pizzeria Cardamomo in 2006. (The restaurant’s name is both a play on Farouq’s moniker and on cardamomo, the Italian word for cardamom, a wild spice popular in the Arab world.) But he has found a new collaborator of a different sort in Sarik Batra, a Californian he met at Lake Como.
As the Mountain View Voice reports, it was sheer happenstance that Farouq and Batra first met while dining separately at another restaurant near Pizzeria Cardamomo in 2018. Farouq didn’t speak English, and Batra, who was visiting Italy with a friend, knew no Italian, but they hit it off anyway. After that first encounter—for which, at the urging of a friend, Batra hastily dabbed on lipstick before going over to speak to Farouq—they stayed in touch, arranging to meet again in Switzerland, then San Francisco and then Baja California, Mexico. They spent six months together in California and made it official, getting married and choosing Redwood City as their home after Farouq sold Pizzeria Cardamomo in April of this year.
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“The beginning of our relationship was all based on expressions (and) Google Translate, and we somehow communicated our whole life stories that way,” Batra, who works in the Bitcoin sector, told the Mountain View Voice. “But now we can pretty much communicate.”
Farouq immigrated from Morocco to Italy when he was 16. He took a job washing dishes at a restaurant, where he learned to cook under the tutelage of one of the chefs. When that chef called in sick one day, Farouq told the owner that he could do the chef’s job. “And not only did he do it,” Batra said, “but his food was better than the chef’s. And then people started to come and only ask for Momo.”

Farouq went on to open his own pizzeria, capitalizing on the reputation he’d built at his first restaurant job. Now he and Batra plan to launch a new iteration of Pizzeria Cardamomo together in early September.
At his Como restaurant, Farouq used only organic, Italian-grown flour for his 48- to 72-hour fermented dough and “matured” his meats in a cold storage room to make them more tender and digestible, according to Pizzeria Cardamomo’s website. At the new Redwood City location, he plans to stick with organic ingredients to make pies like The Morocco, featuring sausage, dried plums, roasted organic almonds and cinnamon, and Pizza al Tegamino, a Turin, Italy-style pan pizza known for its crispy, thicker-than-Neapolitan crust and soft interior.
But leaving Italy was a bittersweet experience for Farouq, as he explained to the Italian publication, QuiComo. “These almost twenty years have been wonderful,” he said. “I would never have thought, when I arrived in Como, that I would build something so beautiful. What I will miss the most are the customers; for me, each one of them is worth more than 10 Michelin stars. I discovered that I have not only customers but true fans who chose to come specifically to my pizzeria, even though it is in a secluded location.”
But, he added, “Like all things, Cardamomo had a beginning and an end. The important thing is to look forward and prepare for a new beginning.”