What's it like to eat at a roadside grill (a mechoui stop) in Morocco?

You smell the stop a kilometre before you reach it — a thick, blue, mouth-watering haze of woodsmoke and roasting fat drifting across the road from a cluster of simple buildings with whole carcasses hanging in the window. Your driver slows without asking, because every Moroccan knows that the best lamb in the country is not in restaurants but at these unmarked grills along the routes between towns, where there's no menu, no decor, and a queue of locals who've driven out specially.

The ritual is wonderfully blunt. You walk to the counter, look the meat in the eye, and point — a rack of ribs, a shoulder, a length of merguez, a fistful of kofta — and it's lifted down, weighed on a hanging scale, and handed to the grill man, who lays it over glowing coals and fans it until it spits and chars. For mechoui proper, the lamb has been roasting whole and slow in a sealed clay pit since dawn, and the cook simply carves you a portion off the bone, the meat so tender it surrenders without a knife.

Then you sit, often at a wobbly plastic table half in the sun, and eat with your hands. There's no ceremony and no cutlery to speak of — just rounds of bread for scooping and gripping, little dishes of cumin and coarse salt to dip each bite into, maybe a raw onion and a tomato salad, and a bottle of something fizzy. The fat has crisped at the edges and run into the lean, the cumin hits, the bread soaks it up, and you understand instantly why people drive an hour for this. Conversation stops; everyone just eats.

It's Morocco stripped right back to the good part. No riad courtyard, no rooftop view, just smoke in your clothes, grease on your fingers, truckers and families and your own party all working through piles of the same superb meat at neighbouring tables. You pay by the weight of what you ate, which is cheap and honest, and you get back in the car heavier, happier, and faintly smoked — already knowing this scrappy stop by the road will outrank half the proper dinners of your trip.