Best Tagine in Casablanca — Home Cooking in the Big City

Casablanca may be Morocco's most modern, international city, but the tagine is still its everyday comfort food. The classics are all here: lamb or beef slow-cooked with prunes and almonds for a sweet-savoury depth, chicken with preserved lemon and green olives, and kefta tagine — meatballs simmered in a spiced tomato sauce with an egg cracked on top at the end. Vegetable tagines over a saffron-onion base are widely available and reliably good for non-meat eaters. Being a coastal city, Casablanca also does an excellent fish tagine, layering the port's fresh catch over potato and pepper with chermoula.

The most honest tagines are cooked at the small canteens (gargotes) and family restaurants where office and market workers eat lunch — around the old medina, the central market and the busy commercial districts — where a properly reduced, glossy tagine with plenty of bread costs little. A well-made tagine is cooked low and slow so the sauce thickens to a rich base you mop up with khobz, never watery or rushed.

At the other end, Casablanca's ambitious modern-Moroccan restaurants plate the tagine with contemporary finesse, in stylish rooms rather than traditional riads, treating the classics as a base for refined cooking. Between the canteen and the smart restaurant lies the whole range, but the flavour tradition is the same. As across Morocco, tagine is a lunchtime dish that rewards arriving hungry in the early afternoon, when it has been simmering since morning.

Order one tagine to share between two with bread and a salad, seek out the fish tagine for a coastal twist, and eat where the crowd is local for the honest version. In a city of seafood and international tables, the humble tagine is Casablanca's reminder of home.