The Sheraton is one of the nicer chain hotels in Casablanca, and subsequently not for the budget traveler. You are immediately ensconced in that traditional Maghrebi hospitality as you are met in the hotel lobby by a greeter, festooned in a rather ornate djellaba and fez, who smiles and hands you a cup of incredibly sweet mint tea. The rooms are top-notch, as the Sheraton caters to a fairly refined clientele.

The traditional Moroccan restaurant at the hotel is El Andalous. Located on the second floor, the restaurant is a pretty good mock-up of one of the high-end Moroccan restaurants to be found in town. The restaurant is outrageously expensive, but the food is wonderful and the portions generous. Since I was on an expense account, I naturally ordered from the bottom right-hand side of the menu: the couscous special with everything. "Everything" included highly spiced dove, figs, and a variety of vegetables. Follow it up with a few bottles of a nice Spanish red, and I was in heaven. The doors open at 8pm, but the restaurant was pretty dead before 10pm. As an added bonus, there is a band there playing traditional Moroccan music and what I felt was probably an Arabic version of Tom Jones-style pop, as the lead singer kept crooning "Habibi" to a gaggle of women at one table in a wavering, teasing voice until they began visibly blushing.

The basement disco of the Sheraton is the Caesar’s Club. This place was a big draw for my Western colleagues in Morocco and for Western businessmen in general. It seemed to operate primarily a "gentlemen’s club", which is to say, it was full of call girls or women searching for Western men.

The hotel is located on Avenue de L’Armée – spitting distance from the business and shopping districts. A nice change of scenery from the hotel is only half a block away in one of the nearby Moroccan cafés. This is a great place to enjoy a cup of mint tea or a coffee and take in the evening scene of cosmopolitan Casablanca. Not surprisingly, a mint tea at one of these cafés was 1/20 the price for the very same at the Sheraton.