What are the best restaurants in Casablanca?

Casablanca is the best city in Morocco for eating broadly, and that is exactly why I tell tagine-fatigued travellers to use their stop here for a good meal. As the country's commercial capital with a long French and cosmopolitan history, it has restaurants you simply do not find in the medinas — proper bistros, sushi, Italian, and a serious seafood culture. If Fes is the soul of traditional cooking and Marrakech the spectacle, Casablanca is where you eat like a local professional on a Friday night.

Seafood is the headline. The Atlantic is right there, and the Marché Central (the central market downtown) is the move I recommend most: you buy fish from the stalls and the little restaurants around it grill it on the spot for a modest price. It is unpretentious, fresh, and full of locals. For something more atmospheric, the restaurants near the port and along the Corniche in Aïn Diab do excellent grilled fish, oysters from Oualidia, and prawns, often with a sea view.

For Moroccan food with character, La Sqala is my standing recommendation — a beautiful garden restaurant built into the old Sqala ramparts, with a leafy courtyard, excellent breakfasts, and well-executed tagines and pastilla. It is touristy in the best way: lovely setting, reliable cooking, calm. Rick's Café also does a polished Moroccan-international menu if you want the film-set ambience with your dinner. For refined traditional dining, the upscale riad-style restaurants downtown deliver the multi-course experience.

A couple of honest pointers. Casablanca's international and upscale restaurants generally serve alcohol, which is harder to find inland, so this is your city for wine with dinner. The Corniche is where the see-and-be-seen lounges and trendier kitchens cluster, while downtown around the Marché Central is grittier and cheaper. And do not skip a French-style café and a pastry — the city's bakeries and patisseries, a legacy of the colonial era, are genuinely excellent. Eat adventurously here; it is the one place in Morocco where variety, not tradition, is the draw.