Restaurant Bab Ssour

Restaurant Bab Ssour is a Moroccan restaurant with a rooftop terrace at 31 Rue Benjelloun in the medina of Chefchaouen, in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. It serves the home-style cooking of the region rather than chef-driven cuisine, with no Michelin context or celebrated lineage, and the kitchen is built around the tagine, the slow-cooked clay-pot stew that defines everyday Moroccan dining. Signature dishes include a vegetable tagine, a root vegetable soup, a lamb tagine with prunes that pairs savoury meat with sweet fruit in the classic Moroccan manner, and a seafood tagine that is less common this far from the coast. The root vegetable soup is a practical order on cool mountain evenings, when temperatures in Chefchaouen drop quickly after sunset. The dining room character centres on the rooftop, where tables look out over the blue-washed medina and the surrounding hills; the mood is quiet and unhurried, with casual dress entirely acceptable and noise limited mostly to street sounds drifting up from the lanes below. Alcohol is generally not part of the offer in medina restaurants of this kind, so the beverage programme revolves around Moroccan mint tea, fresh juices and coffee. Prices fall in the mid-range for the town, roughly 80-150 MAD (about $9-$16) per person, though venue menus are not published, so figures are indicative. Reservations are rarely essential and walk-ins are usually possible, but the roof seats fill first at sunset and in the busy spring and autumn periods, so visitors who want a terrace table can phone +212 6 60 26 11 28 the same day. Because tagines are cooked to order and can take 30 to 45 minutes, diners typically allow an unhurried evening. The location in the medina means the restaurant is reached on foot along cobbled, sloping lanes.