Ammar Badawi had been planning for months to open a restaurant with his father, Khaled, when they finally signed the lease on a Crown Street storefront last summer. The property, located at 283 Crown St., had been vacant since the popular Cuban restaurant Soul de Cuba closed in 2024.
Renovation and Opening
Ammar wanted to renovate the place without hiring a contractor. He and his brother and father started ripping up the floors and replacing plaster walls in August 2025. In November 2025, his father passed away suddenly from pancreatic cancer. Ammar and his brother Gasser paused construction for a month.
On Tuesday afternoon, roughly seven months after his dad’s death, Ammar opened Taktoukah, which bills fresh, fast Moroccan food. He removed brown paper that had been hanging in the windows during construction and welcomed neighbors in.
Background and Menu
Ammar, 23, had not planned for restaurant management to become a career — for years, he wanted to become a physician’s assistant. When Ammar was about to begin his junior year at the University of Connecticut, he realized one day he did not want to study biology anymore, and dropped out. Ammar had to learn Moroccan cuisine while developing recipes for the restaurant’s menu. He visited Morocco and studied Moroccan recipes so he could prepare to run Taktoukah.
Ammar wants his food to “educate” people about the culture — he thinks the variety in New Haven’s restaurant scene makes it a “tough market,” but he is confident in the “fast fresh concept” and Taktoukah.
Original reporting: New Haven Independent — read the source article.
