Café Al Amal - مقهى الأمل

The Moroccan breakfast is its own category. Msemen — thin, layered, griddled pancakes brushed with butter — arrives alongside harcha (a semolina cornbread), beghrir (honeycomb pancakes drowned in honey and butter), khobz with amlou (almond and argan oil spread), olive oil, and fresh orange juice. A pot of strong mint tea, or sometimes coffee with steamed milk (nous-nous), is the anchor. This is the working breakfast across the country, served from 7am into midday at cafés and specialist breakfast houses.

French-inflected pastry runs in parallel. Croissants, pains au chocolat, millefeuilles, cannelés, macarons, and tartes aux fruits are standard in the upper-tier patisseries of Casablanca, Rabat, and Marrakech, often to a standard that would hold up in central Paris. Moroccan pastries — kaab el ghazal (gazelle horns), briouats stuffed with almond paste, chebakia soaked in honey — sit side by side with the French cabinet. Most proper cafés sell both and expect you to order a mix.

The afternoon sitting matters as much as breakfast. Between four and six in the afternoon, every café fills with pots of mint tea, sweet pastries, and long conversations. Specialty coffee has arrived in a real way — flat whites, pour-overs, single-origin Ethiopian beans — without displacing the traditional café noir. A good modern Moroccan café can serve you a perfect espresso, a proper msemen, and a handful of briouats on the same visit. Pick one thing from each cabinet.

A word on ordering and pacing. Moroccan meals are built to be long and shared. Starters — olives, small salads, bread, sometimes a soup — arrive on their own clock, and rushing them short-changes the meal. Mint tea, strong and sweet, almost always closes the table. Tipping is expected at sit-down places; 10 percent on top of a bill that already includes service is a safe baseline. Ask the room what they would order if they were choosing for a friend, and you will almost always be pointed at the real house dish rather than the one printed largest on the menu. That single question, asked politely, is the shortest route to eating well in any Moroccan dining room.