Restaurants & Cafés

Rooftop Dining in Marrakech: What to Expect There is a specific minute, about forty minutes before the sun goes down, when the whole of Marrakech turns the color of apricots. From a rooftop terrace above the medina, you watch the light slide across the flat roofs, the Koutoubia minaret goes from pink to deep rose,

Moroccan Menu Decoder: French & Arabic Food Words You sit down in a Marrakech restaurant, the waiter hands you the menu, and half of it looks familiar — entrées, grillades, desserts — while the other half is a mystery: طنجية، بسطيلة، زعلوك. Moroccan menus mix French course words with Arabic and Darija dish names, sometimes

Gargotes: Eating Where Moroccan Workers Eat Walk past any medina at noon and you will hear it before you see it: the clatter of spoons, the hiss of a grill, a waiter shouting an order across a crowded room. Inside, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, masons and students are bent over steaming bowls at plastic tables. This

Moroccan Café Culture: Ordering Coffee Like a Local Walk past any Moroccan café at ten in the morning and you will see the same scene from Tangier to Dakhla: a terrace full of small glasses, the hiss of an espresso machine that never stops, and men — mostly men, more on that later — settled

How to Order Like a Local in a Moroccan Restaurant Walk into a traditional Moroccan restaurant and the rules are different from what most visitors expect. There is no hostess stand in many places. Bread and olives appear on your table before you order anything. And if you order a “Moroccan salad” expecting a single

The gargote: Morocco’s beloved workers’ canteen The gargote is the most Moroccan of all restaurant types: a tiny, no-frills canteen feeding workers, taxi drivers and students. Expect plastic tables, a handwritten or memorized menu, and some of the best cooking in the country. What to expect: a short menu of tagines, tagine varieties, couscous on