The 13 Best Places to Eat in Morocco

Thirteen tables, concrete walls, and an open kitchen two hundred meters from the Atlantic: Table III is a fine-dining restaurant where a chef who trained at Per Se and cooked across the US and Germany came home to Casablanca to cook Moroccan. Seafood comes straight from local fishers, most of the produce from the restaurant's own gardens, and French technique meets Japanese restraint on every plate. It landed on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants list in its first year.

The kitchen team here spends part of each year traveling Morocco to unearth courtly and regional home recipes, then brings French technique to bear on what they find. The result is Moroccan fine dining that goes well past tagine and couscous, landing on dishes the country's culinary history almost forgot. It sits inside the Royal Mansour, so the room is suitably spectacular. It appears on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants list.

Cerulean blue walls and sunny yellow accents set the tone for this French bistro with serious culinary ambitions, tucked into a Marrakesh side street. The chef works with local, seasonal Moroccan produce and folds it into a menu that reads Parisian but tastes of somewhere specific. A terrace, a wine cellar running past 300 bottles, and a set lunch that draws a crowd who know to come back, it landed at number 21 on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants list.

Massimiliano Alajmo's Italian fine dining room sits inside the Royal Mansour, where the patio catches the kind of Marrakech sunset that makes Venetian cooking feel entirely reasonable this far from Venice. The kitchen uses local ingredients alongside imported Italian staples, pulling both into something that lands on the 50 Best MENA list at number 24. Dress for the room, not the medina outside.

An open kitchen anchors a stripped-back Art Deco space in Guéliz, where the menu changes whenever the permaculture farm on the city's outskirts decides it's ready. Farmers is a vegetable-forward restaurant that partners with a single organic farm, Sanctuary Slimane, and lets that relationship dictate the whole program. The chef uses fermentation, preserving, and slow roasting to do the heavy lifting. It holds a spot on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants list.

The name is Australia's country code, which tells you where the team's head is, even if the room is in Marrakech's Gueliz neighborhood. Moss green banquettes and blush marble make it feel bright at lunch and candlelit at dinner, and the menu runs the same casual line: steak sandwiches, pickled sardines, a Lamington for dessert. It landed on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants list, and the room on any given night looks like half of Marrakech already knows each other.

The shungiku, daikon, and mizuna on the menu come from the team's own nearby organic farm, which tells you what kind of operation this is before you've tasted a thing. It's a Japanese restaurant in Gauthier where you can eat à la carte or surrender to the omakase, and the open kitchen makes the discipline of the whole project visible. Casablanca's Japanese dining scene has a new reference point.

Marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and velvet banquettes put this formal restaurant inside the Royal Mansour squarely in the "dress for it" category. Celebrity chef Éric Frechon drives the menu toward French technique with Moroccan sourcing, the Oualidia oysters being the clearest argument for that arrangement. The room reads more Paris grand brasserie than North Africa, which is either a feature or a bug depending on what you came to Casablanca for.

A family villa in Casablanca's Gauthier quarter, dressed in brocante-chic, mid-century finds and run by two sisters who taught themselves to cook. The French-leaning kitchen punches well above what the cozy dining room suggests, which is part of the charm. Locals who know the neighborhood's eating options tend to know this address; they just don't always share it. A Discovery selection from The 50.

The menu at this fine dining restaurant in Fez's Medina is written fresh each morning, shaped by whatever the market offered that day. Chef Najat Kaanache, who trained at El Bulli and Noma, runs a long tasting experience through ten courses that pull seafood, meat, and vegetables into conversation with pomegranate, raw cacao, and citrus. It has earned a 50 Discovery from The World's 50 Best.