Is Morocco good for foodies?

I have cooked, eaten and shopped my way around Morocco for years, and I tell foodie clients without hesitation that this is a country built for them. The cuisine sits at a crossroads of Berber, Arab, Andalusian and French influences, and you taste all of it: tagines slow-cooked with preserved lemon and olives, lamb with prunes and almonds, the Friday couscous that families gather for, and pastilla — a sweet-savoury pigeon or chicken pie dusted with cinnamon and icing sugar that surprises everyone the first time.

The street food alone justifies a trip. On Marrakech's Jemaa el-Fnaa the food stalls fire up at dusk — grilled merguez, harira soup, snail broth for the brave, and freshly fried sfenj doughnuts. In Fes I send people down the medina alleys for makouda potato fritters, bowls of bissara fava-bean soup eaten standing up, and msemen flatbread torn warm from the griddle. A guided street-food walk in either city is one of the best-value experiences you can book.

The markets are the other half of the story. Wandering a spice souk — the cones of cumin, ras el hanout, saffron and dried rosebuds — is a sensory education, and I always steer foodies toward the produce markets locals actually use rather than the tourist stalls. A cooking class is the experience most people tell me afterwards was their favourite: you shop the souk with a dada (a traditional home cook), then build a tagine and clay-oven bread back in a riad kitchen.

Be honest with yourself about a couple of things. Moroccan restaurant menus can feel repetitive if you only eat in tourist spots, so the trick is to seek out home-style cooking, regional specialities and a good cookery class to break the cycle. Vegetarians eat very well; vegans need to ask about smen (fermented butter) and stock. And do not skip the small pleasures — mint tea poured from height, a glass of fresh orange juice, argan-oil amlou for breakfast. Those are the flavours people come home craving.