Ling Ling Marrakech: The Beats & Bites Experience

Dinner at Ling Ling runs from seven until midnight on the resort's open terrace, where the sharing format and the slow build of the evening have always mattered as much as the cooking. Launched in June 2026 and running through the summer, Beats & Bites is a casual sharing menu served every evening, built for two or more and conceived as an easy escape rather than an occasion: a curated run of signature dim sum, crisp tempura, and grilled skewers at 688 dirhams per person, or 988 with a glass of champagne.

The format is consistent with what Ling Ling Marrakech has always been. The Hakkasan Group's izakaya-inspired room at Mandarin Oriental works on the principle that the food complements the drinks and the company rather than commanding the evening, and its menu is built around modern Cantonese plates designed to be shared. Beats & Bites narrows that idea to a tighter, lower-priced everyday set. Where the restaurant's fuller sharing menu, the Ling Ling Experience, runs to 880 dirhams, this one trims the scope to three things done well and asks only that you bring someone to share them with.

A kitchen with specific hands

The cooking is led by Li Hengfei, a chef with more than fifteen years between Cantonese and Sichuan kitchens, with the dim sum section in the hands of chef Zhang, who has folded dumplings for twenty-five years and learned the craft in Heyuan, in southern China. That precision is why the sharing format holds. The full menu runs to Peking duck served with sixteen pancakes, ginger meat, and small toasts with apricot jam; a supreme dim sum platter; crispy tiger prawns; vegetarian rolls with black truffle and plum sauce; wok-tossed lamb cutlets; grilled sea bass; and a spicy prawn curry. Beats & Bites distills that range into three pillars and lets the table set the order.

The dim sum is where the kitchen shows its hand most plainly. It arrives in stacked bamboo steamers, each piece small and exact: har gow under a dark pearl of roe, siu mai crowned in orange, dumplings pleated and set on slate beside a shard of something crisp. The tempura comes out light and crisp, the skewers worked over the grill. Nothing is built to dominate the table. The composition is meant to be passed across it and rebuilt with the next round.

The terrace, the bar, the hour

Ling Ling occupies the central terrace of the resort, open to the sky and looking out over olive groves, the pools, and the Atlas beyond. As the light goes, cordless lamps warm each table and pierced metal lanterns throw their patterns across the wood. Inside, tall fretwork screens rise behind a long backlit bar, their geometry borrowed from Moroccan craft and rendered in shadow and gold, and a hammered-brass dome hangs over the chef's table, where a glass wall opens onto the kitchen and the brief flare of a wok. The bar is a destination in its own right, with a cocktail list as considered as the food.

The name nods to the music that has always been part of the Ling Ling experience. Over the course of a week the room changes character, from the Yum Cha brunch on Saturday afternoons to the longer, music-led evenings and the occasional Hidden Party, with Beats & Bites added every night as its most relaxed format. On a Beats & Bites night the focus settles on the table and the company, the version of the room for people who come for a good, unhurried dinner rather than a night out.

Open to non-hotel guests and drawing a mix of resort visitors and Marrakchis, Ling Ling has spent years building the long evening out here on the Route du Golf Royal. Beats & Bites applies the same kitchen to an easier, everyday register: a reason to make the drive out on a Tuesday, or any other night, and still eat precisely without any ceremony at all.