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FrançaisA Marrakech food tour takes you into places you would never walk into alone: a butcher’s shop with a pit oven under the floor, a basement where one man burns the city’s rubbish to heat the hammam next door, a bakery turning out 4,000 loaves a day. This is a first-hand account of one evening tour through the medina, what was eaten at each stop and why the stops were chosen.
One thing to know before you book. The company in this account traded as Marrakech Food Tours and now operates as Moroccan Food Adventures, run by the same two people, Amanda and Youssef. The old marrakechfoodtours.com address no longer resolves, so any older guide pointing you there will dead-end.
Who runs Marrakech food tours
Amanda and Youssef Mouttaki have run food tours out of the Marrakech medina for years, and they are the reason this kind of tour works in Morocco rather than feeling like a set menu. Amanda is American, Youssef is Moroccan, and the pairing is the whole product: one of them knows what a visitor will find strange and the other knows which stall is actually good.
The business now trades as Moroccan Food Adventures and its current Marrakech programme runs wider than the single evening walk we did. Their current Marrakech programme lists the Evening Street Tours, the Artisan Day Tour, Authentic Alleyways, the Snacks and Shopping Tour, the Art and Architecture Tour and a High Atlas Food Tour that leaves the city altogether. Booking goes through their own system rather than a marketplace.
Book well ahead. Tours on this scale fill up, the evening slots go first, and turning up in Marrakech hoping for a place tomorrow is not a plan that works.
A Marrakech food tour, stop by stop
The evening tour we joined started at the post office on Jemaa el-Fnaa, the square everyone in Marrakech simply calls La Place, and the directions we were sent were clear enough that we found it on our first evening in the city. The 7 stops below are in the order we walked them.
1. Tangia and mechoui in a butcher’s shop
The first stop did not look like a restaurant at all. It was a butcher’s shop, with sheep carcasses hanging at the back and a hole in the floor that was opened up so we could look down into it. That hole is a pit oven, and meat cooks in it for around three hours in a terracotta vessel.
We ate upstairs on the second floor. Two dishes came out, shared between the group with bread instead of cutlery:
- Tangia, lamb slow-cooked in a tall clay urn, the thing that had been down in the pit.
- Mechoui, whole roast lamb served plainly with salt and cumin to dip it in.
Amanda explained over the food how she and Youssef choose the venues, and her criterion has stayed with me: the place has to look frightening enough that her own parents would not walk in unprompted, and the food has to be good enough that her Moroccan parents-in-law would approve. That is a precise description of what a food tour is for.
2. An olive stall in the souk
The olive stall was the next stop and it took about ten minutes, which was enough. Olives are sold here by what you intend to do with them rather than by variety alone: some cures are meant for salads and cold dishes, others are for cooking into a tagine, and the stallholder will tell you which is which. I liked almost all of them.
3. The pancake shop
A little further into the souks we stopped at a tiny shop where one woman was working without pause on a particular dough, rolling vegetables such as tomato into it to produce something between a pancake and a stuffed flatbread. It was my favourite thing of the whole evening.
We took no photographs here. The people working did not want them, so we put the cameras away, and that is the correct answer anywhere in the medina: ask, and accept no.
4. Youssef’s sardine joint
Youssef’s own favourite quick-food stop came next, and it was sardines, prepared with enough fat that the texture comes out closer to meat than to fish. It arrives in bread, assembled roughly the way a burger is, which completes the comparison he had made on the walk over.
It was very good and extremely heavy. I could not finish mine, and by this point I was already full, which is worth knowing before you eat lunch on the day of an evening tour.
5. The farnatchi, the man who heats the hammam
The stop I still describe to people is the one that is not a meal. Youssef took us through a small doorway into what looked like a rubbish tip, then down steps we could not see into a basement, where a cheerful man was working beside a furnace.
His job is the farnatchi. He collects waste from the streets, which in Marrakech are kept impeccably clean, and burns it to heat the water piped to the hammams above. The top of the same furnace is an oven, and the hot ashes are exactly what a tangia needs to cook slowly for hours. One man, one fire, the neighbourhood’s hot baths and its slow-cooked lamb. That is how the medina recycles.
6. Vegetarian couscous and mint tea
The next stop was a small restaurant where one woman makes the vegetarian couscous, served with mint tea that arrives sweet and very hot. By this point I genuinely regretted how much I had already eaten, and leaving food on that table was the low point of my evening.
7. A bakery, then cookies and smoothies
We went into a communal bakery before the last stop. It is the kind of place where women used to bring dough from home to be baked in a shared oven, and as more households bake at home it has shifted to supplying restaurants instead, at something like 4,000 pieces of bread a day. No photographs from here either, which I regret.
The tour finished on cookies and fresh smoothies. The traditional Moroccan smoothie is avocado with milk; I went for strawberry and mango. Nobody could finish the cookies, so Youssef produced boxes and we carried them back to the riad.
What to know before you book a Marrakech food tour
A food tour in Marrakech works better as the first thing you do than as the last, because it tells you which stalls and dishes to go back to for the rest of your trip. We joined on our arrival day and used what we learned for the following three.
Come hungry and do not eat a meal beforehand. An evening tour is seven or eight tasting stops and the portions are not tasting-sized at the meat stop. Wear shoes you can walk in on uneven ground, because the medina’s lanes are not paved for comfort and part of the route goes down into a basement. Bring cash in dirhams for anything you decide to buy along the way, particularly at the olive and spice stalls. And ask before photographing anyone.
Compare food tours and cooking experiences in Marrakech if the dates you want are already gone, which they often are.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 4 tips below each change something about how you book, starting with the name you need to search for.
- Search for Moroccan Food Adventures, not Marrakech Food Tours. Same people, new name, and the old marrakechfoodtours.com address no longer resolves at all, so a search for the old name will send you to third-party write-ups rather than to a booking page.
- Book weeks out, not days. Our slot was available only because of a personal connection; the evening tours were otherwise sold out months ahead when we went, and this remains the single most common reason people miss out.
- Skip lunch on the day of an evening tour. The first stop alone is shared tangia and mechoui eaten with bread, and there are six stops after it.
- Ask about dietary needs at the booking stage. The tour includes a vegetarian couscous stop and the operator says tours can be adapted for most intolerances, but that has to be arranged in advance, not at the meeting point.
Also read
The two guides below cover the rest of a Marrakech trip.
About the author. This account of an evening food tour through the Marrakech medina was written by Hans Couwenbergh, a wine and travel loving photographer who tells the stories behind his photographs, and you can connect with him on Facebook. He is the father of Sofie Couwenbergh, who founded Wonderful Wanderings in 2012, and the tour was taken on a four-day trip to Marrakech from Belgium. The page is maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team, which covers Morocco for independent travellers, including the tours, riads and restaurants worth booking, and updates this page when businesses change hands, change name or close.
Great experience!
Hi Hans, it looks like you had a great cultural experience here. Food tours seem to be really taking off in recent years and you’ve highlighted why.
I guess without a tour some people would just stick to what they know and not really learn the local food culture. I guess it is like wine tasting, when you have a knowledgeable guide you can learn so much and appreciate it a lot more. There is no problem in disliking what you taste but at least you are more informed.
Those pictures of the walk to the basement make the place look a little bit dangerous and unsavoury, yet I guess it demonstrates an authentic experience.