What are Fes's signature dishes?

If Marrakech is bold and smoky, Fes is refined and aristocratic — this is the imperial city where Moroccan haute cuisine was perfected over a thousand years, and you taste that pedigree immediately. The dish that crowns it is pastilla (bastilla): paper-thin warqa pastry wrapped around shredded pigeon (now usually chicken), almonds and eggs cooked in a saffron-and-cinnamon sauce, baked, then dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon in bold stripes. That first forkful — shatteringly crisp, savoury, sweet and faintly floral all at once — is one of the great flavour shocks of Moroccan food, and Fes is where it's done best.

Fassi cooking is the most labour-intensive in Morocco, the kind that takes a household days to prepare for a wedding. There's seffa medfouna, a mound of steamed vermicelli or couscous hiding tender meat beneath, fragrant with cinnamon, almonds and sugar; rich lamb tagines with prunes, apricots and toasted almonds; and lamb or beef with caramelised onions and honey (mrouzia and its cousins). The hallmark is balance — sweet against savoury, the careful layering of saffron, ras el hanout, orange-blossom water and preserved lemon by cooks who treat it as an art.

The city's character shows in its specialities, too. Fes is famous for its preserved and pickled things, its mastery of slow-cooked offal dishes that the curious should try, and breakfasts of msemen and beghrir (those honeycomb pancakes) with local honey and amlou. Walk the medina and you pass tiny workshops making nougat, dried-fruit sweets and the spice blends that the Fassi take very seriously — this is a city that has thought hard about flavour for centuries.

The best way to understand Fes food is at a proper Fassi table — ideally a home-cooked diffa (feast) in one of the old riads of the medina, where dishes arrive in stately procession and pastilla is the showstopper. I send serious food lovers to Fes specifically for this: it's slower, dressier and more ceremonial than anywhere else in Morocco, and once you've eaten a real Fassi meal you finally grasp why locals consider it the country's culinary crown.