Moro

Moro has anchored Exmouth Market since 1997, and the fusion of Andalusian and North African flavours it pioneered still feels distinct from anything else in the area, even now that half of London has borrowed some version of the idea.

Sam and Samantha Clark built the menu around a genuinely researched premise — the food of Moorish Spain, where North African and Iberian cooking overlapped for centuries — rather than a loose “Mediterranean” gesture, and nearly three decades on, that specificity is still what separates it from its imitators.

The Room

A relaxed, open room with the wood oven and charcoal grill doing visible, central work — this is not a kitchen tucked away behind a service door, and watching it run is half the point of a table here. The dining room itself is unfussy: close-set tables, a lively hum that builds through the evening, and enough open sightline to the grill that you can watch your own order taking shape.

It reads as a genuine neighbourhood restaurant that happens to have a three-decade reputation attached to it, rather than a destination dressed up to look casual.

What to Order

Wood-roasted pork belly with beans and salsa verde is the dish most people order on a first visit and keep ordering on every one after — properly rendered, the salsa verde cutting through the fat exactly as it should. The charcoal-grilled lamb is the other constant worth building a meal around, smoky and simply seasoned enough that the char does most of the talking.

Start with the wind-dried tuna if it’s on: a quieter dish than the mains, but one that shows the kitchen’s North African leanings more clearly than the grill does. Order for the table rather than individually — this is food built to be passed around, not plated for one.

The Drinks List

A well-chosen Spanish and North African-adjacent list, strong on sherry and the kind of structured Rioja that can stand up to charcoal and spice without being overwhelmed by either. Staff are happy to steer you toward something specific if you ask, rather than pointing you to the same three bottles everyone else orders.

What You Will Pay

Around £45–55 per person with wine, which for cooking of this consistency and a room this established is genuinely fair — you’re not paying a premium for the history, just for a kitchen that’s kept its standards up across thirty years of being copied.

The Verdict

Come hungry for the grill, and book — this remains one of Clerkenwell’s genuine destinations, not a name that’s coasting on having been first. The lamb and the pork belly are both worth planning an evening around, and it’s worth resisting the urge to order lightly on a first visit; the kitchen’s confidence shows up more clearly across a full meal than in any single dish sampled in isolation.

Exmouth Market itself has changed considerably since 1997, with newer restaurants opening and closing around this one at a pace that makes Moro’s own longevity look more remarkable in hindsight than it perhaps felt at the time.

What’s Being Said

A style of cooking that’s since been copied across London, still done best at the restaurant that started it. That’s a harder thing to say honestly about a nearly-thirty-year-old restaurant than it sounds — plenty of originators get overtaken by their own imitators eventually, once the novelty of an idea gets absorbed into the wider city’s cooking and the restaurant that introduced it starts to look dated by comparison.

Moro hasn’t been. Part of the reason is that the Clarks never franchised the format or tried to scale it into a group of near-identical branches — there’s only ever been the one Exmouth Market kitchen doing this specific version of the idea, which has kept the standards from drifting the way a wider chain’s inevitably would.

That refusal to franchise is exactly why this review’s rating stays at a full five — nearly three decades in, and the standards have never had the chance to drift.