Marrakech for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Marrakech eats at every hour and on every register — a tagine pulled off a brazier in the medina at lunch, Lebanese mezze on a side street off Riad Zitoun at dusk, a sushi counter in Guéliz after midnight. The twelve rooms below are not a ranking of the city's most famous addresses; they are a working editor's list of places that hold their own argument about what dinner in Marrakech can be. Some are regional Moroccan kitchens that have refused to dilute themselves for the riad-hotel circuit; others are Lebanese, Mexican, Japanese, Balinese, sushi-and-Thai counters that prove Marrakech is no longer a one-cuisine town. They are spread from the deep medina around Souk El Fassi out to Rue Ibn Atya and the avenues of Guéliz, which means your day can begin with an 08:00 breakfast on one side of the ramparts and end at 03:00 on the other. Bring a charged phone for the addresses — derbs are unmarked and even the postal code can argue with you. The citations below trace every street number, hour and phone to the underlying record so you can verify before you go.