Tangier Food Tour — Grand Socco, Medina & Café Culture

Tangier has been a crossroads for millennia — Phoenician, Roman, Portuguese, Spanish, international zone, and always Moroccan — and its food is a delicious record of all of it. A food tour here moves between the bustling Grand Socco (the big market square where the medina meets the modern city) and the atmospheric lanes of the old medina above the port.

You start around the Grand Socco and its market, where country vendors from the Rif bring produce, cheese and herbs, and the food stalls sell Moroccan street classics. From there the medina offers fresh grilled fish and seafood from the strait, Spanish-influenced fried-fish and tapas-style bites, and the olives, breads and snacks of everyday Tangier. The Petit Socco, the small square at the medina's heart, is café territory.

Tangier is famous for its cafés and its pastries. The tour takes in the city's celebrated patisseries — the Andalusian and French legacy makes Tangier one of Morocco's best pastry cities — and a stop at a historic café such as the cliffside Café Hafa, where writers and musicians have taken mint tea over the strait for a century. You taste the sweets, the tea culture and the Spanish-Moroccan crossover in one walk.

It is a tour as much about atmosphere and history as food — the international, literary, port-city romance of Tangier alongside its everyday eating. Bring small cash for the stalls, and expect a mix of market bustle, medina lanes and café calm.