A Mother's Kitchen in Rabat Is Moroccan Food Tour's Best-Selling Stop

Mohamed Benmokhtar and Omar Benhayoun never wrote their company down as a plan. Nine years on, Moroccan Food Tour runs guests through seven cities on nothing sturdier than shared appetite.

A morning walk that opens with dates and walnuts, a cooking class that starts in a souk and ends at a shared table, a full day spent tracing a city's history between tasting stops, even a slow ten-day push down into the Sahara for anyone with the time to spare.

Nearly 30 experiences in total, built out of a decade the two of them spent learning the country they had grown up in. By the company's count it has taken more than 15,000 guests, and it bills itself as Morocco's top-rated food tour operator on Tripadvisor.

"Our tours are created to spark your curiosity, and to just not be on the surface tourist level, but to truly be a traveller and to have genuine human connections," Benmokhtar says.

Benmokhtar and Benhayoun had been friends since university and flatmates through a master's degree in web technology and multimedia. For years the two foodies traded photographs of whatever they happened to be eating.

Neither had once considered the habit a business idea until the night in 2017 when they sat down to watch a YouTuber eat his way through a street somewhere in Asia, and the thought landed. Nobody was doing this in Morocco. They checked whether the domain name was free. It was. They bought moroccanfoodtour.com before the night was out.

Benmokhtar had spent close to eight years cycling through five different companies in web design and development, quietly failing to make peace with office life.

"I am not the kind of person you're going to lock in a desk for eight hours," he says. "As soon as I finish the discovery phase of something, everything becomes very boring."

He left for photography instead, chasing control over his own calendar, and permission to be outdoors. In 2016, a photograph he had taken won a National Geographic Moments award. The prize was a trip to Japan on a photography expedition.

"That's actually the first spark," he says, "of doing something related to the travel industry." These days the company runs its own private photography tours too, guided by a man who has spent time on both sides of the camera.

Before they ever led a paying guest anywhere, they did their own fieldwork. Weeks spent walking Rabat on foot, tracking down the stalls and family-run kitchens that would eventually make up the tour. By October 2017 they had their first booking and a logistical emergency: no online payments, no real infrastructure, and 12 hours to produce a company T-shirt that did not yet exist. He rang a friend who ran a print shop.

"Can you print me a T-shirt for tomorrow?" he asked. "I need it." The friend did. Benmokhtar wore it the next morning to meet his first client, walking a city he had grown up in but had never quite eaten his way through.

That first tour took its guest past dates stuffed with walnuts and into the ceremony of mint tea poured over griddled flatbread, on to a sardine sandwich stall that has remained a fixture of the tour ever since, and finished with pastilla: pastry gone brittle in the right places, almonds ground fine, a dusting of cinnamon on top.

"It was a great experience," Benmokhtar says. "Getting the live feedback from people there, during the tour, was something really amazing." He and Benhayoun did not sleep that night, kept up by the particular, electric insomnia of having just proven, to nobody but themselves, that an idea works.

Marrakech joined in January 2018. By the end of that year they were operating in three cities; within another year, seven: Rabat, Marrakech, Fes, Casablanca, Tangier, Chefchaouen, Essaouira. Then, in March 2020, growth stopped answering to any plan at all, because the entire world did too.

"We said, okay, we're going to take six months to rebuild everything, and it's going to be good," Benmokhtar says. "Who thought it would take two years?"

What followed was a wholesale rebuild of the website, the booking systems, the guide procedures and the internal dashboard. Somewhere in the second year the savings ran out, and the two men went briefly separate ways.

What kept the company's name alive through the worst of it was posting online and collaborating, in 2021, with food-focused YouTubers whose audiences reached considerably further than one small agency in Rabat ever could alone. That decision carried Moroccan Food Tour into a strong 2022 relaunch.

By the time the relaunch had settled, the geography of the operation told its own story about the country itself, one most guests arrive with the wrong picture of entirely.

"This is 90 per cent of the tours," he says. "People hear Morocco and they picture the Sahara, camels, dunes. They think the first thing they'll see from the airport is a camel."

"People don't know the rest," Benmokhtar says. "They know tagine, couscous, maybe mint tea. They don't know rfissa, they don't know tanjia, they don't know chebakia." He pauses, then laughs. "By the end of a tour, people are always surprised. Not just by the food, but by Morocco itself."

"To my taste," Benmokhtar says, without a trace of hesitation, "Rabat is better than Paris. Better than Barcelona."

Moroccan Food Tour's core team is four people: Benmokhtar and Benhayoun, a reservations manager who happens to be Benhayoun's wife, and a social media and sales lead who happens to be Benmokhtar's cousin. Around them sits a wider network of guides and hosts, all of it referred to as the MFT family.

It fulfils an idea most Arab households already understand: that keeping family close, silat al-rahim, and running a good business can share the same clock.

"The main trick is separation," Benmokhtar says. "Sometimes we Arabs don't have that layer between family and work, and if you don't know how to draw it, simply, you can end up in a very difficult spot."

The texture of the company shows up in its regulars. Benmokhtar counts at least four guests, by his own tally, who ended up moving to Morocco after meeting him on a tour. One couple, still undecided on which country to relocate to when they first met him, called a year later from an apartment they had just signed for in Rabat.

"I would not say I personally convinced them," he says. "But I would say, for sure, I added a little something to their decision."

Behind the company's flexibility, the loosely worn itineraries Benmokhtar describes as "just bullet points with rough timings attached," sits a tightly kept network of around 40 guides and hosts. Managing that many personalities and that many kitchens has been the hardest part of the entire nine years.

"You talk to the guides about this type of tour," he says, "and then six months later the reservation comes in, and their situation has changed. They forgot. Things move quickly when it comes to the human element."

The experience Benmokhtar rates highest, out of nearly 30 on the books, has nothing to do with the medina walks. It happens in a family home in Rabat, at his mother's stove, over a preserved-lemon chicken tagine.

Benmokhtar is an only child. His father died a few years ago. His mother, left in a family kitchen larger than one woman needs, had spent 27 years as an administrative worker inside Morocco's Ministry of Education before taking early retirement in her mid-sixties and starting an entirely new career.

She cooked for hotels. She cooked for restaurants. She cooked, for a stretch, for the Moroccan ambassador in Korea, and later in Sudan. By the time she came home for good, she had spent more years cooking professionally than most chefs manage in a lifetime, and she still, by her son's account, could not sit still.

"We started getting these requests: you guys do food tours, but do you also do cooking classes?" he says. "We said, well, let's start doing the cooking classes. I talked my mum through the idea. She loved it. We started. And now she's one of our best sellers."

It is the single experience on the roster he is proudest of, ahead even of the multi-day itineraries guests rate, in his words, as "five stars isn't enough, we need six or seven."

"I take people to my mother's place," he says, "and I'm having fun with them, and my mother is cooking for us, and they get involved too, in the kitchen. Nothing can top this experience. Doing business with your mother is something really worth trying. It's a different level of relationship."