Marrakech has newer rooms, louder rooms, rooms with better views. It has exactly one Comptoir Darna. Since 1999 the Hivernage house has run the same nightly proposition (dinner downstairs, a bar that fills as the plates clear, and a performance that moves through the room rather than staying on a stage) and a quarter-century of imitators has not managed to retire it.

The house is a two-storey villa done in deep reds and low light, the kind of Moroccan-baroque interior that flirts with too-much and lands on exactly-enough. The kitchen works a Moroccan and Mediterranean double register: tagines and pastilla holding the tradition line, the other page keeping mixed tables happy. Nobody comes only for the food. They come for the hour when the music lifts, the candle-bearing dancers descend the staircase, and the room tips from dinner into occasion.

It is a production, and it knows it. What keeps it on the right side of the line is execution, musicians who can actually play, service that never loses the thread, and a crowd worth watching: Marrakchi families marking birthdays, Casablanca weekenders, internationals who booked weeks out. The bar runs late, and the DJ takes the handover once the performance closes.

Book dinner for the full arc rather than arriving for the bar alone. Dress properly; the room does. As an induction into Marrakech’s particular talent for the produced evening, done at institutional standard, the old house remains the reference. The staircase still delivers.