Table 3

Returned to the pass in Casablanca

The tuna meets foie gras at the pass before service, a pairing Fayçal Bettioui, chef at Table 3 in Ain Diab, Casablanca, Morocco, has kept close since opening. He runs the room as executive chef and owner, so the station and the house answer to the same hands. Since 2024, after years abroad and a return from Germany’s Pfalz wine region, Bettioui has shaped Table 3 around a direct brief: fine dining built mainly on Moroccan products. His earlier post at Zur Krone asked him to cook, own, and hold the identity of a restaurant day after day; Table 3 gives that same discipline a different ingredient set and a more personal address. The restaurant sits in his childhood neighborhood, near the Atlantic, and the work reads from that nearness. Seafood leads often. Vegetables matter. The cooking carries French structure and Japanese restraint, but Bettioui keeps the grammar Moroccan first, not as decoration but as the ground the menu stands on.

Moroccan product, held in a fine dining frame

The method at Table 3 begins with sourcing before it reaches the bench. The restaurant draws seafood through direct fisherman partnerships, and 70% of its produce comes from its own land, giving the kitchen a narrower, more demanding rhythm than a menu built around imports. Harvests and tides set the terms. Bettioui has described the concept plainly: “The concept of Table 3 is fine dining, but with predominantly Moroccan products.” That sentence shows in the architecture of the meal, whether a guest chooses à la carte or the tasting menu. Meat recedes; fish, plants, herbs, reductions, umami sauces, and cleanly held textures do more of the work. Tuna and foie gras remains the signature dish, a local surf-and-turf that depends less on novelty than on proportion. The restaurant opened in June 2024, and by 2025 Bettioui had received the American Express One To Watch Award for Middle East and North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants. In 2026, Table 3 ranked No. 11 on the MENA list and was named Best Restaurant in Morocco.

The open kitchen as the center of the room

The room keeps its attention on the pass. Black crushed concrete walls, slatted wood ceilings, and low light pull the eye inward, toward the open kitchen rather than toward spectacle. Service moves in an upscale casual register, close enough for guests to approach the station, quiet enough for the meal to hold its pace. Casablanca dining often favors volume, live music, and a party pulse; Table 3 chooses a smaller temperature. The room feels personal without turning soft. Plates travel from the open kitchen into a dim, warm space, and the wine program follows the same scale, curated around the food rather than built as display. A sommelier guides pairings for the tasting menu, but the cellar does not overtake the cooking. The counter, the pass, and the room stay aligned around Bettioui’s central decision: local Moroccan product, worked with restraint.

A return measured through service

Bettioui has called closing a successful restaurant abroad “a good challenge,” and Table 3 is where that choice now has to prove itself repeatedly, through product, staff, and service. The next measure is not abstract recognition but whether the kitchen can keep its seasonal discipline as the restaurant’s audience widens. For now, the clearest signal remains on Table 3’s plate: tuna and foie gras.