By Erin DeMarois

Zitouna opened its doors this May, bringing a new taste of North Africa to Clement Street and 26th Avenue. The smell of spices drift into the sidewalk, and inside, owner Mehdi Karoui moves through the kitchen the way he tells stories – fast, sensory and anchored by muscle memory. 

“Since I was a kid I loved cooking,” Karoui said. “My mom would kick me out of the kitchen…and then when she was desperate, she’d say, ‘OK, cut the potatoes.’” You can hear the smile in his voice.

Karoui came to San Francisco as a student in the late ’90s and stayed – working across prepared foods and distribution, collecting the kind of kitchen fluency you don’t learn from a manual. After a restaurant partnership in the Mission, he split off with his former chef and opened Zitouna to center the food he grew up on: Tunisian cooking that you can feel.

He talks about knowing a stew needs water from across the room just by looking at it, a sense that comes only from repetition and love. 

“Sometimes I smell something and it hits me from the past,” he said. “It has to taste like the memory.”

Roots and Meaning

Zitouna isn’t just a name – it’s a lineage tracing back to the Great Mosque of Kairouan and the University of al-Zaytuna in Tunis, one of the world’s oldest centers of learning. Karoui chose it as a reminder that food, too, can teach – that a restaurant can be a kind of classroom where every meal tells a story.

Tunisia itself is small but astonishingly varied, with desert in the south, snowy mountains in the north and beaches along the Mediterranean. Its essence is palpable – from the ancient colosseum in El Djem to the rosemary-covered hillsides where lamb graze, their meat carrying the flavor of the land when it meets the fire. Karoui said he hopes diners will take a moment to learn about the country behind the menu – about Zitouna’s namesake, its long tradition of culture and scholarship, and a cuisine that deserves far more recognition than it’s had.

What’s on the Table

Tunisian cuisine is stitched from a long, layered history – Roman and Ottoman, French technique and Mediterranean markets – with rules that keep the balance right. (Cumin with fish? “No way,” Karoui laughs. “Prohibited.”) It’s also, as he points out, wildly underrepresented here. He prepares dishes at Zitouna you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in San Francisco.

Start with the brik (say “breek”), a bronzed and blistered triangle of pastry with egg yolk poised to spill into seasoned ground beef – or tuna, or shrimp or potatoes and herbs. It’s the smell of Ramadan kitchens and late-afternoon hunger, demanding to be eaten with your hands (messily). 

Then the Tunisian plate (“mechouia”), a dish of roasted peppers and tomatoes, smoky and soft, crowned with tuna and an egg. It’s a picnic food that somehow reads as dinner-party chic, the kind of plate that makes you think, “I could eat like this every day,” and mean it.

And yes, there’s couscous, but done the Tunisian way. The grains are steamed and finished together with the braise – an important distinction. Moroccan and Algerian couscous often keep sauce and semolina separate; Tunisian couscous is a marriage, cooked in one pot with meat or fish or vegetables until the flavors are inseparable.

Harissa ties it all together – bright and steady as a heartbeat in Zitouna’s kitchen. When the restaurant first opened, Karoui’s mom came in to make it with him and teach him the proper way: no written recipe, just sight, scent and feel. She had to show him in person, the only way to pass down something you measure by instinct.

A Neighborhood Dining Room (Bring Wine)

When he was scouting locations, Karoui kept coming back to the Richmond District. He liked that it was diverse, near the beach and park and full of locals who support small businesses. 

“It’s mixed – people from everywhere,” he said. Zitouna is a natural fit: somewhere you can stop by after the park, linger over on a weeknight or end up after a “should we just go out?” text. 

There’s a reason the restaurant already has regulars, due in part to the neighborhood’s warm welcome: a liquor-store owner who sends shoppers over, a produce market cashier campaigning for the lunch rush, neighbors bringing in more neighbors. A family with Tunisian roots came to Medhi asking for off-the-menu fricassé “like my mother made,” and of course he offered to prepare it, because that’s what you do when the food is about home. 

“They bring family,” Karoui said, still a little stunned, still delighted. 

But his hospitality is intentional, by design. In his mother’s house, guests were always treated with thoughtful care “no matter your condition,” even if it meant borrowing cookies from a neighbor at 10 p.m. 

That ethic shows up now in a thousand small ways: corkage-free ‘BYOB’–which is not a marketing gimmick so much as a vibe. The open hours are straight through the afternoon from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. – no 3 to 5 p.m. heartbreak – to the tone of “come in, sit down” instead of “how fast can we turn this table.”

“I want people to feel like guests, not customers,” Karoui said. 

In the new year, Sundays will bring a rotation of traditional Tunisian dishes, new appetizers will join the table and a long-awaited catering menu will let diners bring a taste of Zitouna to their own celebrations.

Whether you’re eating at your table or his, the spirit is the same: Zitouna is what happens when a cook builds from memory and leaves space for yours. Come hungry, bring a bottle and savor the flavors.

Zitouna is located at 2435 Clement St. For more information, visit zitounasanfrancisco.com.