The Street Food Vendors of Jemaa el-Fna

The nightly transformation

As the light fades, an ordinary square becomes an extraordinary one. Handcarts arrive bearing collapsible stalls, gas lamps and grills; numbered pitches are set up in rows; and within an hour the open space is a maze of smoking kitchens, each with its benches, its cook, and its criers calling out to passers-by to sit and eat. The smoke rises in columns lit from below, and the noise, the smell of grilling meat and the crowds make the square a spectacle as much as a place to eat.

This nightly ritual has a long history. Jemaa el-Fna has been a place of gathering, commerce and performance for centuries — its name and function bound up with the life of the city — and the food stalls are the modern continuation of its role as a place where the people of Marrakech and travellers alike come together after dark.

What the stalls serve

The food is Moroccan street cooking at its most direct. Grilled meats and brochettes, merguez sausages, kefta, and grilled or fried fish sizzle over charcoal. Great vats hold harira, the thick soup of lentils, chickpeas and tomato. There are stalls devoted to snails (babbouche) served in a fragrant, spiced broth ladled into small bowls; stalls selling steamed sheep's head, a delicacy for the adventurous; and stalls piled with salads, olives and bread.

To drink, there is the ubiquitous fresh orange juice from the daytime carts, and khoudenjal — a hot, spiced drink built on galangal and other warming spices, traditionally sold late into the night and prized as a restorative. Together these stalls offer a cross-section of the Moroccan street-food repertoire, cooked and eaten in the open air.

• Grilled meats: brochettes, kefta, merguez and fish over charcoal.
• Harira: the thick lentil, chickpea and tomato soup, ladled from great vats.
• Snails (babbouche): served in a spiced, aromatic broth.
• Sheep's head and khoudenjal: for the adventurous, plus a hot spiced galangal drink.

Heritage and spectacle

The UNESCO recognition of 2001 acknowledged not the food alone but the whole living culture of the square — the storytellers, musicians, healers and performers as well as the cooks — as a form of intangible heritage worth safeguarding. The food stalls are central to this: they draw the crowds that sustain the square's nightly life, and eating shoulder to shoulder with strangers on a shared bench is part of what makes the place what it is.

For the wider tradition these stalls belong to, see the history of Moroccan street food; for the soup they serve, see the history of harira; and for the merchants of the nearby souks, see the spice merchants of the souk.