Essaouira, a historical port town on the south coast of Morocco isn’t only serving up the freshly just-caught fish of the day. For those of you who prefer your plate to be laden with something off the land, then Essaouira’s food options will also provide you with quite a bountiful choice for a small town.
I spent eight days in this lovely, mellow town and never ran short of places to try. And luckily for me, most of them have wifi and were happy to let me sit and write for hours.
The Local and Not so Local
The staple dishes across Morocco, which you’ve more than likely heard of are couscous and tagines. They can be found everywhere with a myriad of ingredient choices. And in my experience, all were made with fresh ingredients and a love for the traditions behind the dishes.
The pastilla (Moroccan meat pie) was a new one to me and there were some other options I knew but just wore different names than I was used to, like the brochette (kebabs). All of these options too can be found almost everywhere. But if you’re wanting a change from middle eastern cuisine and longing for something closer to what you’re used to, then there’s also pizza, pasta, and burgers.
And for the sweet tooths, there’s also plenty of ice cream choices both of the packaged or the locally made and served in a cone variety. And there is no shortage of patisseries and carts selling wonderfully enticing, waistline stretching handmade cakes, biscuits, and tarts.
Expect to see a lot of bees around food in Essaouira. You may even be treated to a visit from a couple as you eat your meal outdoors. And bees being bees, please don’t panic, instead, welcome them as we humans are doomed without them.
They’ll hover about for a bit doing what bees do and soon enough fly off again. Every patisserie whose windows are full of scrumptious looking cakes and cookies are also full of bees flitting about. At first, it’s a bit disturbing but I just put it down to quality control. The bees are ensuring the merchandise is suitably sweet enough for consumers.
Size and Accompaniments
Meals are served at a good portion size (i.e. not American size) and normally bread (Khobz) and olives are served with each dish except with Tagines. And every meal I ate was made with wonderfully fresh ingredients.
Food-To-Go
If you’d prefer food-to-go there are numerous carts selling anything and seemingly everything; Mesaman (a type of bread-crepe amassed in thin layers this square-shaped beauty is cooked in oil on a hot plate, and is savory rather than sweet – I loved these for breakfast with cream cheese or Nutella) or there’s Khobz (round and either white or whole meal-the wholemeal ones are harder to find-they get sliced along the edge to make a pocket you can fill with a choice of options), then there are kebabs, shawarma, crepes, and calzones as a few examples.
You can also go to the souk (an outdoor square with a market) within the Medina to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. Having lived without stoned fruit (nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries) for the past nine years in Southeast Asia I definitely ate my fill of them in Morocco. They’re fresh off the tree and full of flavor! And best of all, they’re not expensive. Example, you can buy a good hand full of cherries for about .50c.
Supermarket
Or you can go and stock up at a supermarket e.g. Carrefour (a French brand). It’s about a 20-minute walk to the Carrefour supermarket (the most of which is along the beach’s esplanade) from the Medina. I loaded up on supplies and took a share-taxi back to the Medina for 7 Dirham (70c).
Food Places I Tried
This is a vegan and organic food cafe, with salads, tagines, pasta, coffee and a vast selection of juices. I had and really enjoyed the lentil and artichoke salad which came with black olives, pear, cherries, and bread. Cost: 50 Dirhams ($5us)
This is about a 10-seater Italian restaurant that mainly does pizzas of 6-8 varieties. They come in either a small or grande size. They have nice thin crusty bases and the vegetarian pizza was deliciously covered in cheese. They also do a 4 cheese pizza. It’s a great price for a great pizza for only 25 Dirhams ($2.5us) for the small-sized vegetarian.
They also have a food cart out the front of the restaurant that has small child-sized pizzas, calzones and a massive flat metal pan of some flat and cut into wedges, chickpea dish.
And my favorite, a fit in your hand-sized calzone of ham and cheese for 15 Dirhams ($1.5us) that I indulged in a couple of times.
A prime location on the corner of two main thoroughfares and in the sun for most of the day. Lounge around like a cat and warm your soul. Here you can get all the normal dishes plus pizza. I had coffee with milk for 12 Dirhams ($1.20 us) and a simple but scrumptious crepe with banana and Nutella for 10 Dirhams ($1 us)
I stumbled into a hotel off the beach on the lookout for something else and the kind and energetic concierge recommended this place to me. A little pricier, but the meals were of a decent quality and I had a mocktail mojito which was great. The important adage here is the music. They have live music every night. The décor is aimed at modern retro with a little bit of quirky thrown in.
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