What to Eat in Fez: A Complete Food Guide

Fez has the best food in Morocco. This is not a controversial claim among Moroccans — it is the consensus. Fassi cuisine is the most refined and historically elaborate culinary tradition in the country, rooted in Andalusian and Amazigh influences and developed over fourteen centuries of being a capital city. The pastilla, the mechoui, the bastilla au lait — these are dishes that require real skill and time, and Fez is where they are made best.

Pastilla is the essential Fez dish. A flaky warqa pastry — similar to phyllo but lighter — filled with slow-cooked pigeon or chicken, almonds, cinnamon, and eggs, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon on top. The sweet-savoury combination is extraordinary. It is traditionally served as a starter at weddings and celebratory meals, and the best versions take hours to make. Seek it out in the riad restaurants of Fez el-Bali: Dar Roumana, The Ruined Garden, and Café Clock all serve excellent versions.

Harira is Morocco's great everyday soup: a thick, lightly spiced broth of tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas, and vermicelli, thickened with a flour slurry and brightened with coriander and lemon. In Fez, it is eaten for breakfast at the soup stalls that open at 6am in the medina, for lunch, and during Ramadan as the first food of iftar at sunset. A bowl costs around 15–20 MAD ($1.50 USD) and comes with shebbakia — a sesame-honey cookie — on the side. Eat it standing at one of the stalls near Place Rcif.

Mechoui is whole slow-roasted lamb, traditionally cooked in a clay-sealed underground oven for six to eight hours until the meat falls from the bone. In the medina of Fez, you will find mechoui shops — small storefronts with entire lambs hung in the window — near the meat market off Tala'a Kebira. You point to the part you want, it is weighed and sold by the kilo, and served with cumin, salt, and fresh bread. It is one of the great simple eating experiences in Morocco.

Bastilla au lait is the Fez dessert you have never heard of. A stack of warqa pastry layers filled with vanilla-scented cream and scattered with toasted almonds, iced with icing sugar — effectively a Moroccan napoleon, made with the same pastry as the savoury pastilla. Almost every traditional Fassi restaurant serves a version. If you see it on a menu, order it.

Street food in Fez at 7am is a different menu from the tourist restaurants. Msemen — a flaky layered flatbread cooked on a griddle, served with argan oil and honey — is the Fez breakfast. Baghrir — the thousand-hole semolina pancake — is served with butter and honey from street carts. Sfenj — Moroccan doughnuts, fried in oil and dipped in sugar — come in strings from vendors near the bread ovens. All cost between 3 and 10 MAD.

Mint tea in Fez is a ritual, not a drink. Gunpowder green tea steeped with a large quantity of fresh mint leaves and heavily sweetened with sugar — the sugar is not optional. It is poured from height into small glasses to create a froth. In a traditional Fez household, it is made by the head of the family and presented to guests three times. At riad breakfast, it arrives in an ornate silver pot with pastries. It is never just tea.

Where to eat: for the full Fassi culinary experience, book dinner at Dar Roumana, The Ruined Garden, or Café Clock. For street food, follow the medina residents to the stalls near Place Rcif and Bab Bou Jeloud at early morning and lunch hour. Fez Cultural Tours can also arrange a private cooking class in a riad kitchen where you learn to make pastilla, couscous, and tagine from a Fassi cook who has been preparing these dishes for decades.