Ad Dakhla Restaurants

Dakhla is a fishing port, so you'd expect it to be big on seafood. The man from Meknes thought so too. Qasim, his name was. He'd travelled down on the bus with me from Laayoune. Having spent 40 years in Belgium, he'd decided it was time to see his home country from top to bottom. So he'd got to Dakhla on a Sunday evening shortly before sunset, and I met him by chance coming out of a bus company office, having booked himself on the first available bus out in the morning. I guess Dakhla wasn't for him.

Anyway, after complaining about the lack of things to do in Dakhla, he invited me to eat with him that evening. He wanted to eat something local, and suggested either camel or fish. we poked around a few restaurants asking if they served camel, but to no avail, so we ended up in one of the snack bars down the road from my hotel, one which specialized in fried fish and seafood. The waiter told us he'd bring the best stuff available, and we got a big plate of battered calamari with some lukewarm chips (Morocco seems to excel itself in lukewarm chips). It was filling, it tasted fine, it plugged a hole. That was about all I can say. Calamari set us back 30 dinars each.

Fine dining is available in Dakhla for those with money to burn. I tend not to eat that much on holiday anyway, and live off snack food when I feel hungry, but had i wanted a splurge, I could have done so at a couple of seafront restaurants by the Bab al Bahar Hotel, or at one of two Spanish restaurants a bit further north. I'm always dubious of going into empty restaurants, and these never seemed to have any customers...maybe it was just out of season. But the fish stalls and snack bars were always doing a roaring trade, which in my book is a good sign.