What is Tangier and northern coastal food like?

Tangier tastes like a crossroads, because it is one — perched where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and Africa nearly touches Europe. The food carries all of that. Seafood is central: fried calamari and prawns, whole grilled fish, anchovies, and the kind of fritura you'd recognise from across the Strait in Andalusia. The Spanish fingerprint is everywhere, a legacy of the international era and the city's deep ties to Spain — you'll find rice dishes that nod to paella, croquetas, and tapas-style grazing alongside the Moroccan staples.

But it's still thoroughly Moroccan at heart. Mornings in Tangier and across the Rif often start with bissara, that thick split-pea soup with cumin and olive oil, sold from tiny holes-in-the-wall. You'll find tagines and couscous, of course, but lighter and more vegetable- and herb-forward than down south, and the bread and pastry culture shows clear Andalusian influence — delicate almond sweets, and café counters that wouldn't look out of place in Seville. The whole northern palate is cooler, saltier and more Mediterranean than the perfumed inland cooking.

Café culture is its own food experience in Tangier. This is the city of the legendary literary cafés, where you nurse a mint tea or a strong coffee for an hour watching the port and the Strait. The café-and-pastry ritual here feels distinctly Spanish-Moroccan: a glass of tea, a flaky pastry, the sea in the distance, time stretching out. I always tell people to factor in slow café hours in Tangier — it's not wasted time, it's part of how the city eats and lives.

Out along the northern coast — Tetouan, Asilah, M'diq, Al Hoceima — the same themes deepen. Tetouan is renowned for its refined Andalusian sweets and dishes carried north by Granada's exiles; the fishing ports serve whatever came in that day; and the Mediterranean light, the white-and-blue towns and the Spanish echoes make it feel like a different Morocco altogether. For travellers who've done the south, eating their way along the north is a genuine revelation — familiar and foreign at once.