San Francisco’s newest Tunisian restaurant is excited to showcase an age-old cooking technique.
Gola will serve its customers a menu of modern Tunisian dishes on Wednesday April 19th at 819 Valencia St. But the main event will be the dishes, cooked in the eponymous millennia-old pots that nomadic tribes originally used to boil and transport water during desert migrations.
The restaurant is the latest venture from chef Rafik Bouzidi, who ran his former Tunisian restaurant La Marsa in San Francisco’s Union Square, which closed in 2022.
Dishes prepared at the Gola include halal lamb with vegetables, herbed chicken and a seafood and tomato stew with octopus, clams, mussels and prawns. Bouzidi uses Tunisian spice blends such as tabil, an aromatic mix of seeds, flowers and herbs, and three types of harissa – the prized chili paste considered Tunisia’s national spice. The harissa ranges from a smoky, umami-sweet blend to a fiery, spicy blend. Bouzidi’s mother made the tabil he uses during the opening of the restaurant.
“Whoever came from Tunisia, I asked them to bring me something,” Bouzidi said. His brother has brought spices and harissa, and Bouzidi will try to make his own harissa and tabil using dehydrators.
Tunisian chef Rafik Bouzidi will open Gola, San Francisco’s only Tunisian restaurant, on Valencia Street in the Mission District on April 19. The chef imported 180 gola pots to serve diners spicy lamb and seafood.
Felix Uribe/Special on The Chronicle
Golas will be available in three sizes: a small one for two to three people, a medium one for four to five guests and a large pot for up to 10 people. While golas are traditionally upright and opened from the top, those bought by Bouzidi lie on their side to facilitate food serving. Bouzidi puts the pots in his pizza oven to cook overnight and puts them in the fridge in the morning. At dinner, he warms up a pot in the oven to order and seals the opening with a thin bread dough. It takes about an hour to bring a pot to serving temperature and bake the flaky sealant.
Due to the lengthy process of preparing golas, Bouzidi explained, they are only served in limited numbers at dinner.
He could save time and space by simply cooking to order without golas, but Bouzidi insists the quicker process doesn’t allow for the flavors to truly blend and the meat to be served tender straight from the oven.
What’s more, serving regularly doesn’t have the same wow factor for guests as breaking the seal of dough and letting out a dish’s reawakened flavors.
Bouzidi imported 180 golas from Tunisia to be able to offer his dishes every night, but shipping two large pallets of fragile ceramics halfway across the world wasn’t easy.
Cocktails at Gola, San Francisco’s only Tunisian restaurant, will feature flavors like dates, prickly pear and figs.
Felix Uribe/Special on The Chronicle
It wasn’t until an Orange County importer friend found space in a container that the Golas found their way to the States. But transport delays added to what was already a months-long process. When the pots landed in February, he had to drive through a winter storm to pick them up.
“People asked me the name of the restaurant but I couldn’t tell them, even though I didn’t even know if the Golas would be here,” he said. Around two weeks after opening day, the restaurant will be offering its Golas.
Not every dish goes in a gola. Starters and small bites include the Bouzidi dishes offered at La Marsa. Popular 24-hour lamb ribs, a grilled squid salad with red onions and capers, and ‘Tunisian deviled eggs’ with prawns and a spice mix will all be making a comeback. La Marsa, the former restaurant’s eponymous dish, a turmeric cream with shrimp and scallops brightened with lemon zest, will also return. Other dishes include shakshuka, poached eggs in a fragrant tomato stew intensified with Bouzidi’s umami harissa, and a choice of seafood or sausage. Desserts include a crème brûlée scented with orange blossom water and a baklava with hazelnuts and almonds.
The cocktails will be traditional but with a “Tunisian vibe,” Bouizidi said, and will include flavors like prickly pears, dates and figs. A few beers are available. Bouzidi would like to introduce Tunisian wines and Boukha, a Tunisian fig brandy, but he hasn’t found a retailer who offers them. The communal table in the center of the dining room will accommodate guests coming in for a drink, leaving bar seating for groups of two or solo guests.
The revamped 49-seat dining room is quite a change from its previous tenant, the tech-savvy Brew Coop, with its self-serve beer stations and lots of monitors. Bouzidi notes that almost everything is imported from Tunisia – from the ceramics on the walls and the hanging copper lamps to the crockery and the patterned wool lining the benches. Whatever is not imported, he and his brother Samir build or repair, from the plumbing and tiling to the tables and countertop. Bouzidi had a bit of paint left after months of interior work, and hatched turquoise and orange lines in a mural depicting the meeting of the Mediterranean with the Sahara.
“It’s fun to be practical,” he said.
gola Opening Wednesday April 19th. 819 Valencia St., San Francisco. 5pm-10pm, Tuesday-Thursday. 5pm-2am, Friday-Saturday instagram.com/golarestaurantsf/
Reach Mario Cortez: mario.cortez@sfchronicle.com
