If you grew up in Morocco, you know the attar.
If you didn't, the easiest way I can explain him is this: he is the ChatGPT of the neighborhood. Except he was there first, by a few hundred years.
Every old neighborhood in Morocco has one. His shop is small, usually on a corner, and you can smell it before you can see it. The walls are covered in jars. Some are glass, some are old, some are not labeled at all because he doesn't need labels — he knows what's in them.
Behind the counter there is a man, or sometimes his son who is learning, and that's the attar.
People think he sells spices.
He does, but that's not really the job.
You go to him for cumin and saffron, sure. But you also go to him when your hair is falling out. When you can't sleep. When the baby has a fever. When you're getting married and your mother says to ask him what to put in the henna.
When you have a cough that won't go away, he hands you something dark in a paper twist and tells you to boil it with honey. Maybe it helps. Maybe the comfort is part of it. Either way, you remember who gave it to you.
He knows all of this because his father knew it. His father learned it from his father. Nobody wrote all of it down. It just lives in him.
That's what an attar actually is.
He's a recipe book that talks back.
He's hundreds of years of trial and error standing behind a counter, waiting for you to ask a question. Before there was Google, before there were search bars, before anyone wrote down every recipe, there was a guy in a small shop who knew.
My mom has known her attar for thirty years.
When she walks in, he doesn't just ask what she wants. He asks how she's doing, how my dad is, how I am. He remembers what blends she likes and which ones she stopped buying because someone in the family didn't like the smell.
That's a normal relationship to have with the person who sells you spices.
In Morocco, anyway.
When I moved to New York, I went looking for that.
I found nice shops, careful people, good saffron. I'm grateful for all of it.
But there's no attar.
So I figured I'd try to build something that carries a little bit of that feeling.
Not because I could ever pretend to have the experience of a real attar. That kind of knowledge takes generations. It lives in families, in shops, in repetition, in memory, in years of people coming back and saying, “Yes, that worked,” or “No, give me something stronger.”
I am not replacing that.
I am honoring it.
That's what Sookies is.
I'm not really starting a spice brand the way people mean it here. I'm trying to bring something across the ocean that doesn't have a perfect word in English.
We are starting with spice blends because that is the beginning. A familiar place to enter. A way to cook tagine, koofteh, chermoula, and the dishes that need the right balance before anything else.
But Sookies was never meant to stop at spice blends.
More is coming.
The pantry is bigger than that. The attar's shelves are bigger than that. Herbs, teas, incense, oils, rituals, stories — the things people reach for when they are cooking, hosting, healing, remembering, or trying to make a house feel like home.
The blends I make are answers to questions my mom and her attar would have spent twenty minutes on.
A jar for tagine nights. A jar for koofteh. A jar for the days you want the old flavor without having to know every question to ask.
I'll be your attar in Manhattan.
Not the old kind.
Not the kind who learned from his father, and his father before him.
A new kind.
With email instead of a wooden counter.
With spice blends first.
And, slowly, much more.
Same idea, though.
Start with the first drop.
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— Sookies Journal