The Fish Market Grill

Morocco has more than 3,500 kilometres of coastline, and the best seafood restaurants treat that as their menu. Sardines grilled within an hour of landing, calamari tossed in chermoula, whitebait fried at the port, sea bream simply grilled with lemon and parsley — the kitchen you want is the one that changes its list based on what the boats brought in. Essaouira, Casablanca, Agadir, and Tangier each run their own coastal idiom, but the underlying principle is the same: let the fish do the work.

Chermoula is the marinade to know. It combines coriander, parsley, garlic, cumin, sweet paprika, preserved lemon, and olive oil into a green paste that coats everything from monkfish to squid. Tagine of fish is its own tradition — whole sea bream cooked in a clay pot with tomatoes, olives, peppers, and potatoes, served with the broth spooned over couscous or bread. At the coastal end of the country, fish pastilla swaps pigeon for white fish and vermicelli, and tastes nothing like the inland version.

The best seafood meals in Morocco are still the simplest. A plate of grilled sardines with a wedge of lemon, a side of crushed tomato salad, a round of khobz, and a glass of mint tea is the national coastal lunch. If the restaurant displays the day's catch on ice near the entrance and lets you pick, that is the signal you want. If the menu is long and the seafood list is short, order whatever is labelled as arriving that morning.

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.