Swahili food is the coast’s quiet headline act. Here is what to order and where.
Swahili food is the coast's quiet headline act, and most visitors miss it entirely by eating at their hotel every night.
Start with biryani and pilau — rice dishes carrying four hundred years of Indian Ocean trade in the spicing. Then the seafood: whole fish grilled with tamarind, crab in coconut, prawns that were in the water that morning. Mahamri for breakfast, which is a cardamom doughnut by any other name.
Ask your guide where they eat rather than where they are supposed to send you. In Mombasa Old Town and in Lamu that question reliably produces the best meal of the trip.