Samarkand — Restaurant in Dakhla

Samarkand is a beautiful and relaxing café and restaurant directly overlooking the vast blue lagoon in Dakhla, Morocco. My identical twin brother and I spent many days sitting in a beautiful arcade surrounded by bougainvillea directly overlooking the lagoon.

Conveniently located in a popular downtown area on Boulevard Mohammed V near other cafés, restaurants and hotels, you walk into a beautiful garden surrounded by colorful flowers with individual seating areas in semi-private arcades and lattice pergolas.

Samarkand is a great place to enjoy a coffee, tea, soda or water while watching the children swimming in the shallow waters of the lagoon accessed from a white sand beach and rocks.

Up some steep stairs there is a large moderately-priced restaurant with pizzas, a variety of fresh fish and other food items on its menu. There is also a panoramic view of the lagoon from the...

A very nice establishment, which is open during daytime hours (seemingly rare in Dakhla) and which overlooks the idyllic beach and ocean, Samarkind is basically the only option for the western-oriented traveler who doesn't want to wait until past 22:00 for a bit of food. During the day, it seems that only the front café is opened and offers a few types of bread/croissant. Actual food plates do not seem to be available during daylight hours. The pastry is ok, at best. The servers tend to be anything-but-friendly. A tiny cup of espresso (café noir) costs 18dh; not worth the value as coffee, but ok if you factor in the view. Sadly, I feel as if the owner (whoever that may be) does not care for the customer's experience -- else, there simply isn't enough tourism to this area to justify more investment into better service/rs, including all-day...

I think Samarkand is the best space in Dakhla city, an amazing restaurant with a decent café, bakery and fast food kiosque in the ground floor. We kept coming back for the food was heavenly, the service was great and the view over the bay was soothingly outstanding. They offer amazing fish dishes at reasonable price points. We tested the grilled fish that was incredibly tasty and some ground beef and chicken tagine that were great. The samarkand salad is also delicious and refreshing. I recommend you try it...