Is Morocco good for a foodie trip?

This is the trip I most love to plan, because Moroccan food is genuinely one of the great cuisines and most visitors only scratch its surface. They eat a tagine and a couscous and think they have understood it. In reality you have a layered, regional, deeply seasonal food culture — the preserved-lemon-and-olive chicken of the cities, the medfouna 'Berber pizza' of the desert, the fish and chermoula of the coast, the bessara soup of a Fes winter morning, the rfissa, the pastilla with its sweet-savoury pigeon and almonds and cinnamon. A foodie trip here is about getting under that surface, region by region.

Markets are where I always start. A guided souk tour transforms the spice pyramids and olive stalls from a photo opportunity into an education — what ras el hanout actually is, how to buy saffron without being fleeced, why the preserved lemons matter. From there I build hands-on cooking classes, ideally ones that begin with shopping for the ingredients and end with you eating what you made on a rooftop. The dada, the traditional female cooks who hold the real culinary knowledge in Moroccan households, are extraordinary teachers, and a class with one is worth ten restaurant meals.

Street food deserves a serious mention, because Jemaa el-Fna at night is one of the world's great open-air food experiences — grilled meats, snail soup for the brave, fresh juice, sticky pastries — and Fes and Essaouira have their own scenes. I will not pretend stomach upsets never happen; I steer guests to the busy, high-turnover stalls where locals eat, mind the water, and pace the richness, because tagine fatigue is real and a good itinerary varies the intensity.

The meals I am proudest of arranging are the home and family ones. A couscous Friday in a Moroccan home, with the whole ritual of the communal dish eaten by hand from your own triangle, tells you more about the culture than any restaurant. I also weave in the regional pilgrimages — Sefrou's cherries, the Argan cooperatives of the south, the olive harvest, Meknes wine country if you do drink — so the food maps onto the landscape and seasons.

Tell me whether you want fine dining, deep street food, hands-on cooking, or all three, plus any dietary needs — Morocco handles vegetarians very well and I can navigate allergies — and I will sequence the trip so every region adds a new dish rather than repeating the last. Come hungry and curious; this is a country that feeds you generously and means it.