What is Moroccan breakfast drink culture like?

Breakfast — ftour in the morning sense — is one of my favourite meals to introduce to clients, because the drinks anchor the whole table. The standard hot drink is either strong coffee, usually softened into a café au lait or a nous-nous, or a pot of sweet mint tea. In many homes and riads you’ll also be offered a glass of warm milk, sometimes infused with orange-blossom water, which is gentle and lovely first thing.

The real treat, if you’re lucky enough to have a home-style breakfast, is the warm almond-milk drinks and the barley-based sopa or "znbo" you find in rural areas. Many riads serve a frothy almond drink or a cinnamon-scented warm milk that turns breakfast into something genuinely comforting. Alongside it comes fresh-squeezed orange juice — almost mandatory in citrus season — which Moroccans treat as part of the meal rather than an extra.

What the drinks are really there to do is carry the breads. Moroccan breakfast is a bread carnival: msemen (flaky square pancakes), baghrir (the thousand-hole semolina pancakes that soak up honey and butter), harcha (semolina griddle bread), and crusty khobz. You drag them through olive oil, the rich argan-and-almond paste amlou, honey, soft cheese and jam. The hot drink in your other hand resets your palate between each bite.

The spirit of it matters as much as the food. Breakfast here is unhurried and abundant — a riad spread can have a dozen little dishes — and it’s meant to be lingered over with refills of tea and coffee. I always tell clients not to schedule an early start the morning after they arrive; let yourself have a slow Moroccan breakfast on a sunny terrace first. It sets the entire tone of the trip.