Paris – Attracted by the bright red, blue, and yellow hamsa hands hanging outside 76 Charonne street in Paris, and hungry stomachs, customers step into the Moroccan restaurant “1000&1 Signes” unaware of how unique the restaurant is.
Confused at first by the quiet smiles of the staff, clients started to look around and find drawings on the wall that had illustrations for certain phrases and words in French Sign Language (FSL).
The customers browse the menu, and everything becomes clear: 1000&1 Signes is a Moroccan restaurant run by a team of all-deaf staff.
The restaurant owner, Sid Nouar, is the first deaf person to open a restaurant in France. He founded 1000&1 Signes with three specific goals: offering jobs to deaf people, educating hearing people about the FSL, and building a bridge between the deaf and hearing communities.
Illustrations in the restaurant showing how to order in FSL.
“My restaurant is another form of activism, another form of raising awareness,” Nouar told MWN.
Nouar decided to take action after witnessing all the difficulties deaf people face in finding jobs.
A 2014 French official study showed that almost 40% of people with hearing limitations ranging from severe to total functional are unemployed.
“There is a lot of discrimination, prejudice, apprehension, and lack of awareness among companies,” according to human resources manager of the restaurant, Sophie Afonso.
Nouar is a former teacher who graduated in educational sciences, but cooking has always been his passion. He grew up with his dad working in a restaurant and his mother a talented cook who instilled his love of Moroccan food.
Nour attended entrepreneurship training and then opened his first restaurant in 2011, where his mother worked with him to teach Moroccan recipes to the deaf staff.
The restaurant owner remembers how difficult it was to recruit because a lot of deaf people did not have any knowledge about Moroccan cuisine.
Since April 2021 the restaurant has been recognized as an “adapted business,” according to a French official label facilitating the recruitment of deaf workers.
The building of Nouar’s first restaurant was too small to handle its success.
Nouar decided to look for other premises with more space and found one in his neighborhood in the 11th district of Paris.
The restaurant 1000&1 Signes offers various dishes from couscous to Moroccan briwat.
When it comes to ordering, clients can either sign the name of the dish, which is illustrated next to each meal entry on the menu in FSL or point out what they would like to eat.
Clients with hearing impairments are carefully considered to make them feel at ease, even though Nouar estimates that 85% of their customers can hear.
A few rules are explained on how to communicate with someone who is deaf on the back of the menu, and whiteboards are available for anyone who would have a specific demand to write.
Two regular customers, who are both hearing persons, said that they enjoy the staff’s company and the quality of the food.
While sipping a mint tea or tasting a gazelle horn, people can observe the chef Rhyan Pajo cooking behind the open kitchen or the waitress Annabelle Lecavalier welcoming the pleasantly surprised newcomers into the restaurant.
Chef Rhyan Pajo cooking behind the open kitchen.
The warm environment set up by the staff creates a place where people want to communicate while gathering around delicious Moroccan food.
Nouar and his team are proving every day that communication does not always need to be vocal and that exchanges between deaf and hearing communities can be easier than we would expect.
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