Restaurant Dar Hatim is the kind of address you don't find without help. There is no sign on the door, no street-facing window, no clue from outside that the small lane you've been walking down ends at a family dining room. The restaurant is the Hatim family's house, a building inside Fes el-Bali that dates from the 9th century and that the same family has cooked from for roughly a hundred years. Karima and her daughters run the kitchen; the dining room is their tiled salon.

There is no à la carte. Guests pick from three fixed three-course menus, all in the 220–300 MAD per-person range, all built around the classics of Fassi home cooking: Moroccan salads and warm bread to start, then either pastilla fassia, steamed lamb, or lamb m'hamer slow-cooked in honey and onions, and finishing with Moroccan pastries and ice cream. Vegetarians are looked after on request — the kitchen leans on tagines, vegetable couscous and salad spreads in that case. The food is unhurried, plainly portioned, and almost nothing on the table is a concession to non-Moroccan palates.

You have to book, ideally at least a day ahead, because the family cooks to order and needs head-counts in the morning. The same family also runs the Riad Al Fassia Palace nearby, which is how most people first hear about Dar Hatim. When you call to reserve, ask them to send someone to walk you in — the lanes around Place R'cif don't read on phone maps, and the door looks like every other door in the medina.