How do I find the best food in Morocco?

The single best filter for great food in Morocco is the crowd. A "snack" joint or a rotisserie with a line of workers out the door at lunchtime is serving food that's good, fresh and fairly priced — locals won't queue for a tourist trap. Conversely, the restaurants ringing the main squares with laminated menus in five languages and a waiter waving you in are almost always the weakest meals in town. My rule on the road is simple: walk one or two streets back from the obvious tourist drag and eat where I see Moroccans eating, and I'm rarely disappointed.

Street food is where Morocco's real culinary character lives, and the busy stall is the safe stall — high turnover means everything is fresh and hot. Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech is the famous theatre, but the stalls locals actually rate are often the unglamorous ones serving snail soup (babbouche), grilled sardines, merguez, or a bowl of bissara bean soup with a glug of olive oil for a few dirham at dawn. Follow your nose to a smoking grill surrounded by Moroccans, point at what looks good, and you'll eat better than at any sit-down "Moroccan experience" restaurant.

Use your host as a local guide. Riad owners, guesthouse families and drivers know exactly where the good cheap food is, and a sincere "where do you eat?" almost always beats any guidebook listing — they'll often send you somewhere you'd never have found, or that doesn't even have a sign. Many riads will also cook dinner on request, and a home-style tagine slow-cooked over hours, or a Friday couscous made by someone's grandmother, is the version of these dishes you came to Morocco for, light-years from the rushed restaurant rendition.

A couple of tips to go deeper. Eat seasonally and regionally — sardines and seafood on the Atlantic coast at Essaouira, pastilla and rich tagines in Fes, dates and desert breads in the south — because the best dish in any place is usually the local speciality. And consider a cooking class or a guided street-food walk early in your trip; you learn what to look for, how to order, and which stalls to trust, and the rest of the trip's eating gets better as a result. Be a little adventurous and follow the locals, and food becomes one of the highlights rather than an afterthought.