Merzouga

Moroccan cooking is built on patience. The defining dishes are the tagine and the tanjia — clay pots that sit over charcoal for hours, turning lamb shoulder, chicken thighs, or beef cheeks into meat you can lift with a piece of bread. Saffron, cumin, preserved lemon, olives, prunes, and almonds do the heavy lifting. The best houses in Morocco refuse to rush any of it; tagines here are ordered early or pre-ordered the day before.

Alongside the slow pot you will find couscous, the Friday lunch of almost every household, steamed three times over broth until each grain stands separately under a canopy of seven vegetables. Pastilla, a Fassi specialty, wraps tissue-thin warqa pastry around pigeon or chicken with almonds, sugar, and cinnamon, finished with a dusting of powdered sugar that startles first-time eaters. Harira, the tomato and lentil soup poured into bowls at sunset during Ramadan, lives on menus year-round.

Bread is never optional. Khobz rounds arrive at every table and replace the fork for about half the meal. A pot of mint tea, poured from a height into small glasses three times over, is the universal closer. If the menu reads honest — tagine of the day, couscous on Friday, seasonal preserved lemons — you are in a real Moroccan kitchen, not a tourist adaptation. Ask what the house is proud of and order that.

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.