Some bars chase a theme. The Chesterfield simply is one: an English pub, upstairs in a Gueliz hotel, that has outlived most of the city's flashier openings.
The pub occupies the first floor of the Hôtel Nassim at 115 Avenue Mohammed V, in the middle of the Gueliz strip. Frommer's includes it in its short list of Marrakech nightlife worth a traveler's evening, and the format it describes still holds: deep seating, wood and brass, a proper bar counter, and a calm that is rare on this avenue. Hours run daily from 11:30am to 1am, long for a city where many licensed rooms open only after dark.
The name tells you the furniture. Leather chesterfield-style sofas anchor the room, and the better tables sit by the windows over Mohammed V. In warm months drinkers spill onto the hotel's poolside terrace, an oddly pleasant place to hold a pint while the traffic hums below. It feels closer to a members' lounge than a Moroccan café, which is exactly why its regulars keep it.
Order simply. Draft and bottled beer, including the local Casablanca, is the room's bread and butter; the spirits shelf is deeper than the average Gueliz bar; and the kitchen turns out pub-adjacent plates and tapas-style snacks rather than full dinners. Prices land mid-range for the new town, above Café Atlas, well below the Hivernage hotels.
Who is it for? Expats, long-stay visitors and anyone over thirty who wants a conversation with their drink. When Tripadvisor's Marrakech forum is asked where to watch football, the recommendations cluster along Avenue Mohammed V, and the Chesterfield is the most comfortable room in that cluster: on big match weekends the screen goes on and the volume stays civil. For wall-to-wall coverage and thirteen screens, S Bar Sports Lounge is the louder alternative.
Best time to go: weekday early evenings, when the sofas are free and the service is unhurried, or Sunday afternoons for a Premier League slot with a quiet crowd. It also works as a pre-dinner stop before the restaurants of Gueliz fill from 8pm.
The Chesterfield holds the pub seat in our Marrakech sports bar ranking and appears across the Marrakech city guide and the Gueliz neighbourhood pages. For its equivalents elsewhere, start with our global sports bars index.
