Fez Food Tour: Street Food, Spices & Pastilla

Fez is widely considered the culinary capital of Morocco, and the reason is history. As the imperial and scholarly centre of the country it absorbed Andalusian, Amazigh, Arab and Jewish cooking and kept the refined end of all four. Dishes that are special-occasion food elsewhere in Morocco, such as pastilla and rfissa, are everyday Fassi cooking. This guided food walk is the fastest way to understand that, one counter at a time.

Where the flavour starts

We begin in the spice souk, where your guide opens the sacks and explains what ras el hanout actually contains and why no two blends are the same. You will smell dried rose, cumin, mastic, ginger and the long grey roots nobody can ever identify, taste preserved lemon and three kinds of cured olive, and learn which spices belong in a tagine and which belong in a sweet.

The street food route

From there it is a slow crawl through the medina: sfenj doughnuts fried in the morning, msemen and harcha from a griddle, bessara bean soup in a tiled room with no sign on the door, snail broth for the brave, grilled brochettes, and khlii, the preserved spiced beef that Fez households keep in jars. We stop at a communal wood-fired bakery where families send their own dough to be baked and collected by name, and at a nougat and sesame-sweet stall that has been in the same family for generations.

Sitting down

Midday we sit for the real thing: pastilla, the sweet and savoury pie of almonds, cinnamon and slow-cooked poultry in paper-thin warqa pastry, or a tanjia lifted straight out of the ashes, or a tagine that has been under its lid since early morning. Afterwards there is mint tea poured from a height and a plate of Fassi pastries, kaab el ghazal and briouat and ghriba.

Come hungry

This is a lot of food. Skip breakfast. Tell us about allergies, vegetarian or halal-only requirements and anything you simply will not eat, and we will rebuild the route around it without making a fuss about it.