Moroccan Food: 12 Dishes to Try and Where to Find Them

Moroccan cooking is a blend of Amazigh (Berber), Arab, Andalusian and Mediterranean influences, built on slow cooking and layered spice blends such as ras el hanout. Here are the dishes worth seeking out, what each one actually is, and where to eat them well.

The mains

Tagine is both the dish and the conical clay pot it is cooked in — a slow-cooked stew of lamb with prunes, chicken with preserved lemon and olives, or vegetables, on nearly every menu in the country. Couscous is hand-rolled semolina steamed over broth and piled with seven vegetables and meat, traditionally the Friday family meal, so it is at its best toward the end of the week. Tanjia is a Marrakech speciality — meat sealed in an urn and cooked for hours in the embers of a hammam furnace; order it a few hours ahead.

The showpiece dishes

Pastilla, also spelled bstilla, is flaky warqa pastry over spiced pigeon or chicken, almonds and egg, dusted with cinnamon and sugar — sweet and savoury at once, and a wedding and celebration dish. Mechoui is whole lamb slow-roasted until it falls apart, carved and sold by weight; look for it around lunchtime in the Marrakech medina.

Soups and street food

Harira is a tomato, lentil and chickpea soup with fresh herbs, eaten to break the fast during Ramadan but served year-round, often with dates and sticky chebakia. Bissara, a fava-bean soup drizzled with olive oil and cumin, is a winter breakfast in Fes and the north. Msemen and beghrir — laminated flatbread and "thousand-hole" semolina pancakes with honey and argan-almond amlou — are the classic breakfast. On Marrakech's Jemaa el-Fnaa you will also find maakouda potato cakes and bowls of snail soup.

Drinks and sweets

Mint tea — green tea, spearmint and a lot of sugar, poured from height — is offered constantly, and refusing a glass is harder than accepting one. Fresh orange juice on Jemaa el-Fnaa is cheap and everywhere. Sweets lean on almonds, honey and sesame: kaab el ghzal (gazelle horns), chebakia, and sellou.

Where to eat well

In Marrakech, the Jemaa el-Fnaa night stalls for atmosphere and grilled meat, and medina rooftop restaurants for tagine at sunset. In Fes, family-run riad kitchens do the best pastilla and slow-cooked lamb. On the coast in Essaouira, grilled sardines and the day's catch straight off the port.

Cooking classes and food tours

A half-day cooking class — shopping in the souk, then a tagine over charcoal — is one of the better ways to spend a spare afternoon in Marrakech or Fes, and it is easy to add to a private tour.

We can build market visits, a cooking class or a food-focused evening into any itinerary. Browse our tours or tell us how you like to travel.