Where can I find good coffee and specialty cafés in Morocco?

Let me be honest first: traditional Moroccan café culture is built around strong, slightly bitter French-roast espresso and the famous nous-nous (half coffee, half steamed milk), not third-wave pour-overs. If you want a proper flat white or single-origin pour-over, you need the big cities. The good news is that scene has genuinely arrived in the last few years and some of it is excellent.

In Marrakech, Bacha Coffee inside Dar el Bacha palace is the showpiece — a colonial-era coffee room with hundreds of single-origin beans served in silver pots; it is touristy and pricey but the setting is extraordinary. For everyday third-wave coffee, the Gueliz new town has the best concentration: small roasteries and brunch cafés around Rue de la Liberte and Avenue Mohammed V pull proper espresso. In the medina, several riad rooftops now do decent flat whites for the homesick.

Casablanca is, to my taste, the real coffee capital. It is the most cosmopolitan city and you’ll find genuine specialty roasters and brunch spots in the Gauthier and Maarif districts pulling competition-grade shots. Rabat has a quieter but serious scene too, with a couple of roasteries in the Agdal and Hassan neighbourhoods. Tangier, with its European history, has lovely old cafés like the Gran Café de Paris where Bowles and Burroughs sat — atmosphere over flavour, but worth it.

My practical advice: in smaller towns and the desert, embrace the local style rather than hunting for what you have at home. Order a nous-nous, sit in a street-side café watching the world go by, and you’ll have a better time than chasing a perfect cortado. And always try the coffee with a pinch of the spice blends some places offer — a little cardamom or black pepper in the grounds is a quiet northern-Moroccan tradition.