Marrakech is one of those cities that messes with your senses in the best way. Orange blossom, charcoal smoke, somebody's mint tea pouring from a great height three tables away. The Standard just put together a full weekend itinerary for eating your way through it, and it's a good one, so let me build on it with my own two cents because I've gotten pleasantly lost in that medina more than once.

Start the way every Marrakech day should start: breakfast on a rooftop with msemen, those flaky square flatbreads, dripping honey and softened by amlou, the almond-argan spread that Morocco does better than anyone. Don't rush it. The medina before ten is a different animal, calmer, cooler, shopkeepers still sweeping their doorsteps.

Lunch belongs to the souks. The famous spots like the food stalls around Jemaa el-Fnaa get the hype, and some of it is earned, but my rule anywhere in Morocco is simple: follow the line of locals, sit where the grandmother is eating, and point at whatever she's having. The Standard's itinerary hits a mix of hyped restaurants and quieter corners, and that balance is exactly right. You need one big-name dinner while you're there, the kind of place where they rework traditional dishes with modern plating, but you also need the tiny place with four tables where the tajine comes out of a clay pot that's seen more years than you have.

And a note on tajine itself, because people get weird about it. The best one I ever had was in a village in the Ourika Valley about an hour out of the city, lamb and prunes, cooked so long the meat gave up trying to hold together. I forget the name of the place. I remember the meal perfectly. That's usually how Morocco works.

Afternoon is for the covered markets and the spice sellers. Buy saffron, buy ras el hanout, buy preserved lemons even if you don't know what to do with them yet, you'll figure it out at home and feel smug about it. I've said before that the fastest way to understand a country is through its condiments and spices, and Morocco might be the ultimate proof of that. One sniff of a proper spice stall and you'll get it.

Dinner, then, is the event. Marrakech does that magical thing where a rooftop restaurant suddenly appears above a dark anonymous alley, and you climb four flights thinking you've been scammed, and then the Atlas Mountains are glowing pink on the horizon and someone's pouring you mint tea. Book ahead for those. The good ones fill up a week out.

Practical bits: stay inside the medina if you can, even a small riad, because the early mornings and late nights in those alleys are half the experience. Carry small bills for tips. Learn one word, shukran, thank you, and use it constantly. And when you inevitably get lost, and you will, let it happen. Every wrong turn in Marrakech ends somewhere delicious. Every place has something, but Marrakech has an unreasonable amount of it.

Three days is enough to eat well and not enough to eat everything, which honestly works out fine, because it gives you a reason to go back.