Taste the Difference in Moroccan Food Free Walking Tour

We had the most amazing time at the tour with Jalil! He showed himself as a very knowledgeable guide, answering all our questions not just about food but about Marrakesh and Morocco in general! Jalil brought us to places with very authentic dishes that we would have never found by ourselves, and where everything tasted absolutely incredible! We learned a lot about local customs, history, recent developments, and saw very different parts of Marrakesh! Definitely one of the best experiences we could have in the city, would recommend a million times!

Jalil is a friendly guide, but the tour itself was disappointing. My first booking was cancelled by him with 2 hours notice (I booked it a month in advance) and rescheduled for the next day. I had to make a lot of changes to my plans and other bookings to accommodate him, but I was very excited for the food tour so I made it work. The tour itself involved a lot of pointless walking - I expected to walk between interesting and special places, but really we just traversed the medina to visit two very average cafes/restaurants, and a touristic spice shop. You would get the same experience randomly picking cafes and shops to visit (we ate at much better and more interesting places ourselves in the trip). Jalil is good company, so if you think of it as dinner with a local then maybe it is fine, but this is not a food tour that a seasoned traveler would expect. The tour promised to show us how locals "shop, prepare their food and eat", and on that measure I don't feel it delivered. We learned nothing about shopping, and only a little about food preparation and eating. The first stop, for tea and biscuits, cost a very reasonable 10 dirhams. It was nice, but nothing special - you'll have mint tea everywhere in Morocco, you don't need to walk 20 minutes on a tour to get it at this specific cafe. At the second stop he ordered a variety of standard dishes for us to all share (pastilla, tagine, tangia, couscous), at a cost of 100 dirhams each. I suppose this is average for a touristic restaurant, but the quality was average so overall it was a bit of a let down. I've had better meals for 80 dirhams and worse meals for 200, so it's average. More importantly, from a holistic perspective it just didn't feel like a food tour. We weren't being taken to special places or given special foods, sampling from all over the medina: it just felt like dinner at a restaurant he picked out for no particular reason, at least no reason that was for the benefit of our experience. So it was okay, I enjoyed the conversation with Jalil, but he was on his phone a fair bit throughout the evening, but when he wasn't I thought he was good company and enjoyed the conversation.

Jalil was a great guide. He is very knowledgeable and friendly. The tour was really interesting and the food was delicious!