What are the best restaurants in Tangier?

Tangier is one of the best seafood cities in Morocco, and the reason is geography — it sits where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, so the catch is superb and varied. The simplest, most reliable move is to eat fish near the port or in the little grill restaurants around the Petit Socco and the medina, where you point at what looks good and it comes off the charcoal minutes later. It is fresh, cheap, and deeply local, and it is what I steer most visitors toward first.

For something more refined, the Kasbah has acquired a genuinely good upscale scene as the city has gentrified. El Morocco Club is the standout — an elegant restaurant and piano bar in a restored Kasbah mansion, with polished Moroccan-international cooking, a lovely courtyard, and a cocktail bar downstairs that nods to Tangier's old cosmopolitan glamour. It is the place to dress up a little. Several other restored riads in and around the Kasbah now do beautiful candlelit dinners with rooftop views over the strait.

Tangier's international past gives it a culinary range you do not get inland. There is a strong Spanish influence from the years across the water — tapas, fresh anchovies, Iberian touches — and the old European cafés and patisseries still pour proper coffee. The Grand Café de Paris on the Place de France is a faded literary landmark worth a stop for the history as much as the espresso. This blend of Moroccan, Spanish, and French is exactly what makes eating in Tangier distinctive.

No food answer about Tangier is complete without Café Hafa, even though it is a tea house rather than a restaurant. Since 1921 it has served mint tea on cliff-edge terraces overlooking the sea, and the experience — the view, the breeze, the ghosts of the writers and musicians who sat there — is one of the simple great pleasures of northern Morocco. Have your seafood lunch in the medina, your smart dinner in the Kasbah, and your mint tea at Hafa, and you will have eaten Tangier exactly right.