Vegan Food and Options in Marrakech, Morocco

We’ve been in Morocco for around a week now, and of course have spent quite a bit of that time exploring Marrakech’s culinary scene! Before coming here, I was concerned that it would be hard to be vegan in Morocco. 

The good news is that it’s much simpler than I expected! Just about every restaurant has tajines, traditional dishes cooked in clay pots. I haven’t yet seen a restaurant that has tagines without offering a (coincidentally vegan) vegetable option. 

Another omnipresent option is the vegetarian couscous. This is similar to the tagine, except that the vegetables are cooked on a bed of couscous. It’s extra-filling -- in fact, too filling for me most of the time, so I generally go with the vegetable tagine. 

Both the vegetable tagine and the vegetable couscous are generally served with a side of bread that you can use to scoop up the food or just soak up the filling.  

The prices usually range from about 30 dirhams (just over $3 USD) to around 65 dirhams (around $7 USD), or higher if you go to fancier or ultra-touristy places. 

The bad news is that there isn’t much variety. Aside from these two dishes, most of what’s on the average menu tends to be full of meat. It seems like it would be easy to apply some of those dish concepts to a vegetarian dish (how about potatoes, apricots, and walnuts to mirror the available dish of lamb, apricots, and walnuts?), but that isn’t done. 

Instead, every vegetarian couscous or tagine is some mixture of the following: carrots, zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, chickpeas, cabbage, peas, olives, green beans, and squash. I

t’s good, but creativity and variety would be even better. 

The other struggle is that vegetarianism seems to be much more understood than veganism. Getting a vegetarian pizza was no problem, but convincing the waiter that I honestly didn’t want cheese on it was a little more of an ordeal, making it seem like this isn’t a frequent request here. 

There are some restaurants that specifically cater to veganism and vegetarianism, but of course these are generally more expensive (and filled with tourists).

In short, my recommendation is to stick with the vegetable tagines and couscous. It may not be exciting after a while, but it’s tasty, filling, and nutritious.