Best Restaurants on the Ain Diab Corniche, Casablanca — Seafront Dining

The Ain Diab Corniche is Casablanca's leisure coast — a long seafront boulevard lined with restaurants, beach clubs, ice-cream parlours and cafés, stretching west from the vast Hassan II Mosque. This is where Casaoui families stroll on weekend evenings, where the young come to see and be seen, and where much of the city's seafront dining and nightlife is concentrated. The views over the crashing Atlantic and the floodlit mosque are part of the meal.

The food ranges from casual to upscale: seafood restaurants plating grilled fish and platters of prawns and calamari, international and Italian tables, beach-club lunches, and coffee-and-pastry stops for the promenade crowd. Prices climb with the sea view and the fashionability of the address, but you can eat well across the range, from a simple grilled-fish lunch to a full seafood platter with a sunset backdrop. In summer the beach clubs run all day and into the night.

Go in the late afternoon to walk the Corniche, watch the surfers and the sunset over the ocean, and settle into dinner as the mosque lights up. For seafood, look for the busier restaurants with visible fresh displays; for atmosphere, take a terrace table facing the water. Ain Diab is more about the setting and the scene than culinary revelation, but for a relaxed seafront evening in Casablanca it is the obvious choice.