What are Marrakech's signature dishes?

Marrakech's most local dish, the one outsiders rarely know, is tanjia — and it's a beautiful piece of city history. Lamb or beef goes into a tall clay urn (also called a tanjia) with preserved lemon, garlic, cumin, saffron and a knob of smen (aged butter), the top is sealed, and it's carried to the neighbourhood hammam where the furnace-keeper buries it in the warm ashes to cook for half a day. Traditionally it's the bachelors' dish — workmen's food, prepared by men, cooked while they work. The result is meat so soft it collapses, and a flavour you simply can't rush. I always tell clients: order tanjia in Marrakech and nowhere else, because this is its home.

The other great Marrakchi meat is mechoui — whole lamb slow-roasted in underground pit ovens until the skin crackles and the flesh pulls away in your fingers. Near Jemaa el-Fnaa there's a tiny alley of mechoui stalls where they hack off a portion by weight, hand you bread, cumin and salt, and you eat standing up. It's primal and unforgettable, the meat impossibly tender, the fat rendered to silk. For a meat lover, this is Marrakech on a plate.

Then there's the theatre of Jemaa el-Fnaa at night, which is a cuisine in itself. As the sun drops, the square fills with smoke and lantern light and rows of food stalls: skewers of grilled lamb and merguez, fried fish, steaming bowls of harira soup, and — for the brave — bowls of babbouche (snail soup in a peppery broth) and even sheep's-head. I love walking clients through it slowly, letting them graze stall to stall. It's noisy, smoky, completely alive, and it's where Marrakech eats out under the stars.

What ties it together is that Marrakech is a robust, meat-forward, smoke-loving city — earthier and bolder than refined Fes. Even the sweets lean generous: sticky chebakia, honey-soaked briouats, and date-stuffed pastries sold from the souks. Eat a tanjia at lunch, graze Jemaa el-Fnaa at night, and finish with mint tea on a rooftop over the Koutoubia, and you've tasted the city's whole confident, hospitable personality in a day.