Best Restaurants in Marrakech

Where to eat in Marrakech, medina to Gueliz, with honest notes on the famous names, which places need booking, where alcohol is served, and what the Djemaa el-Fna stalls are really like.

Marrakech is not one restaurant city, it is three, and most visitors only find one of them. There is the medina, where the good rooms are hidden behind doors with no sign and the cooking is traditional, candlelit and often unlicensed. There is Gueliz, the twentieth-century district across the Koutoubia, where the city eats when it is not performing for anyone, and where the newer kitchens and the wine lists are. And there is the road out of town, the Route du Barrage and the Palmeraie, where lunch happens under olive trees beside a pool and takes four hours. A week here that only eats in the medina misses two thirds of the city. What follows is where we send our own guests, with the honest notes attached. Two caveats before the list, because a restaurant guide that pretends otherwise is not useful. First, Marrakech turns over: rooms close, chefs move, a place that was extraordinary two years ago can be coasting today. We re-check before we book anybody in, and you should treat any list, including this one, as a starting point rather than a guarantee. Second, the single best Moroccan meal most of our guests eat all week is not in a restaurant at all. It is the tagine their own dada cooks at the villa on the second night, and it ruins them slightly for everywhere else. The medina institutions Dar Yacout is the one people mean when they say they want a Marrakech night. It is a riad turned dining house, designed by the American architect Bill Willis, and the point is as much the building and the roof terrace as the food, which is a set menu of Moroccan classics. It is theatrical and it is not cheap and it is worth doing once. Le Foundouk, a few streets away, is the more restrained version of the same idea: a restored caravanserai with a courtyard and a roof, a kitchen that does both Moroccan and French, and a room that works for a group of eight without feeling like a performance. Le Trou au Mur is where we send guests who have had the grand riad night and now want the food without the staging. It is home-style Moroccan, including the dishes that rarely make a tourist menu, and the kitchen will explain what things are if you ask. Nomad, on Rahba Kedima, is the modern-Moroccan rooftop that changed what the medina expected of itself: lighter cooking, a view over the spice square, and a room that fills with people who live here as well as people visiting. Directly below it, Cafe des Epices is the unfussy version, fine for a mint tea and a sandwich when the square has worn you out. Le Jardin is the courtyard garden in the middle of the souks, green and cool and a genuine relief at two in the afternoon when the alleys have become too much. It is not the best food in the city and it does not claim to be; it is the best place to stop moving. For a serious lunch in that part of the medina, Bacha Coffee inside Dar el Bacha is the more interesting stop, as much for the restored palace as for the coffee list. Palais Eliah, Marrakech Gueliz, where the city eats

Marrakech is not one restaurant city, it is three, and most visitors only find one of them. There is the medina, where the good rooms are hidden behind doors with no sign and the cooking is traditional, candlelit and often unlicensed. There is Gueliz, the twentieth-century district across the Koutoubia, where the city eats when it is not performing for anyone, and where the newer kitchens and the wine lists are. And there is the road out of town, the Route du Barrage and the Palmeraie, where lunch happens under olive trees beside a pool and takes four hours. A week here that only eats in the medina misses two thirds of the city.

What follows is where we send our own guests, with the honest notes attached. Two caveats before the list, because a restaurant guide that pretends otherwise is not useful. First, Marrakech turns over: rooms close, chefs move, a place that was extraordinary two years ago can be coasting today. We re-check before we book anybody in, and you should treat any list, including this one, as a starting point rather than a guarantee. Second, the single best Moroccan meal most of our guests eat all week is not in a restaurant at all. It is the tagine their own dada cooks at the villa on the second night, and it ruins them slightly for everywhere else.

The medina institutions

Dar Yacout is the one people mean when they say they want a Marrakech night. It is a riad turned dining house, designed by the American architect Bill Willis, and the point is as much the building and the roof terrace as the food, which is a set menu of Moroccan classics. It is theatrical and it is not cheap and it is worth doing once. Le Foundouk, a few streets away, is the more restrained version of the same idea: a restored caravanserai with a courtyard and a roof, a kitchen that does both Moroccan and French, and a room that works for a group of eight without feeling like a performance.

Le Trou au Mur is where we send guests who have had the grand riad night and now want the food without the staging. It is home-style Moroccan, including the dishes that rarely make a tourist menu, and the kitchen will explain what things are if you ask. Nomad, on Rahba Kedima, is the modern-Moroccan rooftop that changed what the medina expected of itself: lighter cooking, a view over the spice square, and a room that fills with people who live here as well as people visiting. Directly below it, Cafe des Epices is the unfussy version, fine for a mint tea and a sandwich when the square has worn you out.

Le Jardin is the courtyard garden in the middle of the souks, green and cool and a genuine relief at two in the afternoon when the alleys have become too much. It is not the best food in the city and it does not claim to be; it is the best place to stop moving. For a serious lunch in that part of the medina, Bacha Coffee inside Dar el Bacha is the more interesting stop, as much for the restored palace as for the coffee list.

Gueliz, where the city eats

Cross to Gueliz and the register changes completely. Al Fassia is the one to know: a Moroccan restaurant run entirely by women since the late 1980s, and the place we recommend more than any other in the city for a first proper Moroccan meal. The cooking is precise rather than showy, the pastilla is the benchmark other pastillas get measured against, and unlike much of the medina it is licensed, so a bottle of Moroccan red is possible.

Amal Center is the other Gueliz address worth planning around, and it is the one guests write to us about afterwards. It is a non-profit that trains disadvantaged women in professional cooking, and the restaurant is where they work. Lunch is simple, daily-changing Moroccan home food at a fraction of medina prices, the room is full of locals, and the money does something. Go at noon, it stops serving early, and it does not do dinner.

Beyond those two, Gueliz is where the newer kitchens are, the ones doing Moroccan produce with a lighter modern hand, and it is where the wine lists live. It is also where you go when the group has eaten four tagines in a row and somebody quietly asks for a salad and a steak. That moment arrives on about night four of every trip and it is worth planning for rather than resisting.

The Djemaa el-Fna stalls, honestly

Every guide tells you to eat at the night stalls in the main square. Here is the honest version. It is one of the great spectacles in North Africa: the square fills at dusk, the smoke goes up, the numbered stalls appear out of nothing, and it is genuinely worth seeing. The food is mostly fine and occasionally good. It is almost never the best meal of your trip, the touting is relentless, and if anyone in the group has a nervous stomach it is a poor place to find out.

Our advice is to go for the spectacle, eat lightly, and treat it as an evening rather than a dinner. If you want the genuinely great street food in that area, the better move is Mechoui Alley just off the square in the morning, where slow-roast lamb is pulled from underground ovens and sold by weight with cumin and salt and bread. That is a Marrakech meal people remember, and it costs almost nothing, and it is finished by early afternoon.

Lunch out of town, which is the underrated day

The Route du Barrage and the Palmeraie are where Marrakech goes for lunch, and it is the part of the eating map that visitors most often miss. The shape of the day is a slow drive out, a long table under olive trees, a pool nobody is in a hurry to leave, and a return around five. Beldi Country Club is the established version and works well for a group. For guests staying in the Palmeraie it is a short drive rather than an expedition, which is one of the quiet arguments for basing out there.

The other out-of-town meal worth building a day around is in the Agafay, the stone desert forty-five minutes south, where camps serve dinner under the sky with the Atlas behind. It is not the Sahara and anyone telling you