Moroccan food is one of the great cuisines of the world, and eating well here is not difficult. The best meals are often found in the least obvious places — a hole-in-the-wall cookshop in a medina, a family restaurant with no menu in French.
Tagine is the everyday centrepiece: a slow-cooked stew of lamb, chicken, or vegetables built around spices (cumin, coriander, ginger, saffron, ras el hanout) and usually paired with preserved lemon, olives, prunes, or apricots. The conical earthenware pot it cooks in is also called a tagine. Chicken with preserved lemon and olives is the classic. Don't confuse "tourist tagines" cooked quickly on a gas burner with the real thing — the best are slow-cooked over charcoal for hours.
Couscous is the Friday dish, traditionally prepared at home. A mountain of steamed semolina with braised lamb or chicken and seven vegetables, usually served with a bowl of broth on the side. You'll find it at lunch on Fridays in restaurants across the country.
Pastilla (or bastilla) is the most distinctive dish in Moroccan cooking: a thin, flaky pastry stuffed with slow-cooked pigeon or chicken, almonds, eggs, and cinnamon, dusted with powdered sugar. Sweet-savoury-spiced. Worth ordering wherever you see it on a menu.
Harira is the Ramadan soup — a thick, tomato-based broth with chickpeas, lentils, fresh herbs, and a tangle of vermicelli. It's eaten at iftar (breaking the fast) but served year-round. Cheap, filling, and excellent with a chebekkia (fried honey pastry).
Street food is excellent. In Marrakech and Fez, whole sheep heads (a delicacy — the cheeks and tongue are the best bits), merguez sandwiches, msemen (flatbread), and b'ssara (fava bean soup with olive oil and cumin) are available from street stalls. The grill stalls in Djemaa el-Fna in Marrakech are touristy but still good.
Seafood along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts is superb and affordable. Grilled sardines are the national fish — simple, fresh, eaten with a squeeze of lemon and charmoula (herb and spice marinade). Oualidia on the Atlantic is famous for its oyster farms. In Essaouira, the port-side grill stalls serve whatever came in that morning.
Mint tea is a ceremony as much as a drink. Gunpowder green tea brewed with fresh mint and an alarming amount of sugar, poured from height to create foam. Refusing the first glass offered is considered rude; refusing the third is acceptable. "Berber whiskey" is the joking name for it.
Argan oil is produced from the nuts of the argan tree, which grows almost exclusively in the Sous region of southwest Morocco. It has a nutty, distinctive flavour used in amlou (a paste with almonds and honey, eaten with bread at breakfast) and as a finishing oil on salads and couscous. Don't confuse culinary argan oil with the cosmetic variety.