What is Essaouira and Atlantic coast food like?

Essaouira is my favourite seafood town in Morocco, and the experience starts at the harbour, not the restaurant. The blue fishing boats come in, the catch is laid out on ice along the quay — sardines, sea bream, sole, conger, prawns, squid, spider crab — and you simply point at what you want. They weigh it, throw it on a charcoal grill right there at the port, and minutes later you're eating it at a plastic table in the salt breeze with bread and lemon. Grilled sardines done this way, smoky and oily and fresh, are the taste of Essaouira for me.

The town's wild card is sea urchin (oursin). For a few months of the year, urchins are gathered off the rocks and sold and eaten raw on the spot — you crack the shell, scoop the orange roe, and taste pure concentrated ocean. It's a delicacy locals adore and adventurous travellers should try when it's in season. Alongside it you'll find fresh oysters (from up the coast at Oualidia), grilled squid, fried small fish, and seafood pastilla — a coastal, savoury twist on the famous Fassi pie, filled with fish and seafood instead of pigeon.

Essaouira also sits at the edge of argan country, so the region's nutty golden oil and amlou (the almond-argan-honey spread) appear on tables here as a local specialty — drizzle the oil over grilled fish or bread and you get a lovely toasty richness. Add the town's relaxed, artsy, slightly windswept mood — gulls overhead, ramparts, gnaoua music drifting from the medina — and the food feels lighter, saltier and more laid-back than the rich, perfumed cooking of Marrakech a few hours inland.

What I love most is how unfussy it all is. This isn't ceremonial cuisine; it's market-to-grill eating, governed entirely by what the boats brought in that morning. After the intensity of inland tagines and souks, a couple of days in Essaouira eating charcoal-grilled fish with your fingers by the harbour is the palate-cleanser every Morocco trip needs. Come hungry, eat what's fresh, and let the Atlantic set the menu.