Souk to Nuts: How to Eat Like a Local in Marrakesh

“Marrakesh.” Even the way the name of the Moroccan city trips off the tongue and echoes down the back of your throat evokes visions of an opulent Middle Eastern city redolent of rich, earthy spices, ornate Islamic architecture, and denizens in flowing robes clinging to a past as old as the dust coming off the Atlas Mountains.

“The soul of Marrakesh is unpredictable, chaotic, deeply rooted in Berber history with Arab and Andalusian influences, a blend of the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean, the desert, and the Atlas mountains,” says chef, cookbook author, and Serious Eats contributor Nargisse Benkabbou. “But it’s also a city that’s always looking forward—an overload of colors and sounds and smells where ancient history coexists with modern life, like with the ancient souks that have been widened to accommodate bigger crowds. It’s a very unique place in Morocco.”

At sunset, the pinkish, millennium-old walls of the ancient old city turn a striking orange-red, giving the city its nickname, the Red City. This is when the city’s grand main square and its branching souks, under the watchful eye of the nearby ancient mosque, fills with food vendors opening their stalls, ladling out turmeric-perfumed bowls of rich, red tomato harira soups or handing out skewers of cumin-y lamb kefta dripping with fat while visitors gawk at performing monkeys and hissing cobras. 

But the Marrakesh of today is also a distinctly 21st-century city—one that has embraced its diversity. Recent influxes of French and British residents have made it a second home, bringing European sensibilities to the restaurant scene that mingle intoxicatingly with the city’s deep Berber and Arab cultural foundations.

“The food scene is very eclectic nowadays, and Marrakesh has evolved a lot in the past 15 years,” Benkabbou says. “A big chunk of the people who live in Marrakesh now are not from Marrakesh, which is great because they bring a modern perspective and a diversity that makes the most out of our traditions and celebrates them in that modern way. You can find places where people still eat like they used to communally 40 years ago, and then you can go to a place like Le Jardin that’s also traditional Moroccan but very modern.”

A native Moroccan, Benkabbou truly knows the food scene of Marrakesh, the city where she opened the restaurant L’Mida Marrakesh as executive chef five years ago. She’s also the author of an internationally acclaimed cookbook on Moroccan cuisine, making her an ideal guide for our tour of one of the world’s food capitals in this second installment of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

A Food Day in the Life of a Marrakesh Local

From morning to night, the rhythms of Marrakesh sway to the beat of its eats—from bakers pounding out dough at daybreak, to the scraping of clay tagine lids at midday, to the gentle splash of mint tea being “pulled” from pot to cup and and then deposited into a dainty teacup after dinner.

“You wake up and get a coffee or fresh orange juice or Moroccan mint tea or harcha filled with butter and honey, followed by a big meal for lunch or dinner,” Benkabbou says. “Lunch is often a tagine, which could be a chicken tagine or a prune tagine, accompanied by what we call salads, including raw salads like tomato and cucumbers or cooked salads like pea, olive, and preserved lemon salad.”

Sometimes a meal comes with dips, which are eaten with flatbreads like harcha, made with semolina and cooked on a griddle, or khobz, which is pita-like and made with regular flour. “You dip the bread and use it to scoop up peas and other foods—you eat with your hands a lot in Moroccan food,” she says.

Around 4 p.m., Moroccan tea time—which they call “gouter” after the French word for “to taste”—is sacred. You might take your tea with harcha, m’semen (a multiply folded griddled flatbread), fekkas (biscotti-like almond biscuits), or ghriba (a nutty, cinnamon-laced, sugar-dusted cookie).

That's how to eat in Marrakesh; now on to what and where.

Restaurants

Dar Marjana

5 Derb Sidi Ali Tair Bab، Doukala

Marrakesh is very much a city that embraces modernity, but that doesn’t mean that it’s forsaken its past. Dar Marjana is a restaurant that’s made itself a haven for those thirsting for the Marrakesh of yesteryear. 

The restaurant is built as if it were in a shaded oasis, inside an interior courtyard with a burbling fountain, checkerboard marble floors, and fringed with palm trees. Diners sit or lounge on low-lying, pillow-strewn couches called seddari. The place was once a riad, a palace or wealthy home built around that inside courtyard, and features ornately tiled and chiseled columns, dramatically hung velvet curtains, and soaring archways. The ceilings here are high—some 20 or 25 feet, making you feel like you’ve been invited to dinner at the behest of some sort of Moroccan prince.

Servers in traditional Moroccan caftans bring enormous tagines in the classic conical clay pots, along with smaller, elaborately decorated plates of salads and dips and other dishes, which you and your companions help yourselves to communally. Sometimes, you eat accompanied by a musician playing an oud, a traditional 11- or 13-stringed instrument similar to a lute. Or you eat as you watch people performing traditional Berber dances like an ahidous, in which the men and women stand shoulder to shoulder and move in rhythm to a central drummer.

“Dar Marjana reminds me of my grandmother’s house, because it’s like stepping back in time,” Benkabbou says. “It’s a big ceremony, and if they serve tea, they make the whole ceremony of the tea,” including the tradition of “stretching” the tea by pouring it back and forth between vessels in improbably long pours that make the liquid look like it’s defying gravity. 

One of the dishes to get here is the lamb and prune tagine, cooked the m’qualli way. “In Morocco, there are rules to cooking the tagine the m’qualli way,” Benkabbou says. “It’s traditionally made with ground ginger, ground turmeric, garlic, salt, and pepper, and that’s the core of the tagine—some people add coriander or saffron if they’re feeling fancy.” From there, the choice is whether to make the tagine savory—in which case it’s finished with preserved lemons or olives—or sweet, in which dried fruits and nuts are added.

“The secret to a good tagine is to let it simmer for as long as it can,” Benkabbou says. “I like to remove the meat and let the sauce reduce for an hour or more—in Morocco, there’s a debate about whether a thick or runny sauce is better, and I like a thick sauce, with the Maillard reaction and caramelization."

Benkabbou's own lamb and prune tagine recipe pays homage to her mother's version. "I think, to be honest, I was just recreating a recipe I ate all my life. After I left my parents’ house in my 20s, I would ask my mom for it first when I’d come home," she says. "It hits all the notes when it’s saucy and the meat is falling off the bone and you can smell what kind of tagine you’re having 10 meters away from the kitchen.”

Le Jardin

32 Souk Jeld Sidi Abdelaziz

Fast-forward half a century and you may find yourself at Le Jardin, a modern take on traditional Moroccan cuisine by young and inventive local chefs. Set in a greenery-festooned garden that could be the backyard patio space of a hip Brooklyn restaurant, Le Jardin is the place to go for smaller, less party-size portions of excellent chicken tagine under the illumination of hanging wicker lanterns. 

“They have their menu of traditional things, but keep it fresh and with a modern twist, like chicken bastila served with sour cream and cherry coulis,” Benkabbou says. Bastila is, to be as reductive as possible, a Moroccan chicken pie. But it’s much more than that, as she conveys in her streamlined bastila recipe.

“It’s definitely one of the most emblematic dishes of Morocco, a pie of nuts and scrambled eggs, chicken, and warqa that every single Moroccan has eaten growing up, especially for celebrations,” she says. “We serve it at weddings, at births or engagements—any big thing. If it’s your birthday, you ask your mom to serve bastila. I served it to the guests at my wedding.”

Bastila is a "labor of love," and is typically a dish that families trot out to impress a lot of people—Benkabbou recalls helping her mother make three or four very big ones for their family gatherings of over 200 people.

“You have to purchase the warqa [a Moroccan pastry dough similar to phyllo] from the women in the souk who make it in front of you, then put on layers of chicken cooked with with lots of spices and onions, then reduce the sauce and put eggs and almonds and so on in layers until you get that beautiful, golden, crinkled, crispy, crunchy pastry topping,” she says. “The recipe I developed [for Serious Eats] is a cheat version, all in one pan. It preserves the soul of the dish but saves you three hours minimum.”

Le Jardin’s contemporary take is made with cherries and sour cream for a "modern twist” that builds on a traditional foundation that every Moroccan knows as intimately well as their alphabet. “You take something so traditional and iconic and add something only to make it better. It’s a reflection of modern Moroccan chefs trying something new but not making it too crazy.”

Markets

Jamaa el-Fna

The closest thing Marrakesh has to a central square is Jamaa el-Fna, a millennium-old public space in the city’s medina, or old town, which is ringed by those 11 miles of pinkish-orange walls that give the city its moniker, “the Red City.”

Just as in the past 10 or so centuries, Jamaa el-Fna is still where people congregate to sell, buy, eat, drink, and celebrate. Looming over it is the 253-foot minaret of the 12th-century Kutubiyyah Mosque, which seems to look on as the square fills every day with musicians and dancers, buskers with performing monkeys on chains, snake charmers with hissing, swaying cobras, and other sights and offerings from all over North Africa and the Mediterranean.

But it’s at night when most of the food hawkers set up their stalls, filling the entire square with the smells of turmeric, cumin, and fried onions and garlic.

This is a good place to get a steaming bowl of harira, the thick, bright reddish-orange vegetable-and-legume soup that Moroccans traditionally break their Ramadan fasts with every day, along with a date. 

“My memory of harira is from when I started fasting at 12 or 13,” Benkabbou says. “Ramadan was always a special time because that’s when everyone would gather every night to break the fast no matter how busy my brothers or parents were, like a family reunion every night for a month. Everyone was just so happy to be eating that nobody was arguing!” 

For a large, hungry family, harira was the perfect solution to a day without meals, offering a hearty dish that filled their home with the fragrance of stewing tomatoes, turmeric, and cinnamon—all essential ingredients in Benkabbou's harira recipe.

Harira is a versatile dish that can be made myriad ways, and Benkabbou’s is just one version among many. When you’re not making your own, you can find good representatives of harira at the food stalls in Jamaa el-Fna. They start setting up in the early evening, around 6 p.m., and stay until they sell out. Benkabbou says she liked stall No. 35 on her last visit, but what’s there changes constantly, and you’re better off finding your own new favorite.

“I recommend people be adventurous and try out different stalls—you can always ask for a small taste before you decide to buy, and they will say yes because it’s part of our culture not to say no to people when they ask for food,” she says.

Jamaa el-Fna is also an excellent place to get sfenj, fried rings of dough that resemble roughly textured doughnuts but without the intrinsic sweetness. “They are light, chewy, and crispy on the outside,” Benkabbou says. Made from a simple yeast dough, they’re fried until golden and typically enjoyed warm, either plain or dipped in honey or jam, or sprinkled with sugar.”

Moroccans commonly eat sfenj for breakfast or a late-morning snack, usually along with mint tea, though vendors also sell them in the afternoons on weekends. When you buy sfenj, it’s customary to buy five or six at a time. The merchant loops them together on a length of twine, and ties the twine into a loop, which you hook your finger into and carry home to share with your family.

Mellah Market

Souk el Kheir

Salads play an essential role in many Moroccan meals, even if they’re often side dishes rather than the main attraction and generate less buzz from tourists than, say, a show-stopping tagine in a conical clay pot. 

One Moroccan salad Benkabbou likes to make at home is a joyful and complex ode to spring, built around the fresh spring peas that pop up at Marrakesh’s souks after the chill of winter fades away. She contrasts the pop of freshness from the just-warmed spring green peas and with the briny, sour power of olives and preserved lemons.

“It’s very common to use seasonal vegetables to make our mint salads, and peas are something we have in spring that we cook in the m’qualli way,” she says. “For me, it’s something very Moroccan and homey with the olives and the preserved lemon, a savory salad that’s a great side dish.” 

Radiating out from Jamaa El-Fna are the city’s historic souks, the honeycomb of open-air marketplaces that have fed and clothed the people of Marrakesh for centuries. Among these souks is the Marché du Mellah, or Mellah Market, which Benkabbou counts among the best places to buy fresh fruits and vegetables—including the key ingredients for her pea, olive, and preserved lemon salad. You might want to take home souvenirs or Marrakchi spice mixes, jars of preserved lemon, or essential Moroccan clay cookware, like a charmingly decorated tagine.

“This bustling market is a feast for the senses, with vibrant colors, fragrant spices, and the chatter of vendors calling out their daily specials,” she says. “Stalls overflow with seasonal produce, sun-ripened fruits, and briny olives, while the air is filled with the aroma of fresh herbs. It's lively, chaotic, and offers an immersive glimpse into the daily rhythms of Moroccan life.”

Making the Most of Marrakech

Considered by many to be the most beautiful city in Morocco, Marrakesh is an enticing destination for its stunning architecture, the vibrant melange of cultural influences on display, and tradition of hospitality. But this jewel of North Africa should also be on the bucket list of any world-trotting food lover. You’re sure to find your own culinary oasis here, whether it’s under the lid of a tagine or among the vegetable hawkers of a souk.