Best Cafés in Rabat — Riverside Terraces and Capital Calm

The most celebrated café in Rabat is the Café Maure inside the Kasbah des Oudayas — a terraced café set in the blue-and-white kasbah's Andalusian gardens, looking out across the Bou Regreg river mouth to Salé. Here you sit over glasses of mint tea and plates of Moroccan sweets with one of the best views in the capital, as boats cross the estuary below. It is more a tea-and-sweets institution than a coffee bar, and a Rabat rite of passage.

In the ville nouvelle and along the main boulevards, French-legacy café terraces line the pavements, where locals sit for hours over a coffee watching the calm capital go by. The coffee vocabulary is the national one — nous-nous (half coffee, half milk), café cassé (espresso with a splash of milk), qahwa kahla (black) — and these places are unhurried social spaces where a single drink buys a long stay. Rabat's measured, administrative pace makes its cafés especially relaxed.

The Agdal district, home to much of the city's student and professional life, has a growing specialty-coffee scene: modern espresso bars and brunch cafés serving flat whites and pour-overs to a young crowd, with wifi and calm interiors that make them good for working. Alongside them, ordinary neighbourhood cafés serve strong coffee and mint tea to a local clientele throughout the city.

For the essential Rabat café experience, take mint tea at the Café Maure in the Oudayas for the river view, then settle into a ville nouvelle terrace or an Agdal coffee bar for a slower cup. In this calm capital, café-sitting is a pleasure to be lingered over, never rushed.