Maputo eats where the Indian Ocean meets Portugal and the Zambezi valley: prawns weighed on ice tables and grilled behind the market, cassava leaves pounded with peanut and coconut into matapa, and coal-blackened chicken drowned in piri-piri.
The neighbourhood market where Maputo cooks actually shop: pyramids of matapa leaves, coconuts split to order, piri-piri paste sold by the jar and raw cashews by the kilo. Open 06:00–17:00 daily, busiest before 09:00.
Choose tiger prawns, crab or capitão from the ice tables and haggle by the kilo, then carry the bag to one of the grill kitchens behind the hall, which cook it with garlic, lemon and piri-piri for a fee. Daily 07:00–20:00.
Maputo's rawest market: sacks of dried kapenta and salted shrimp, bundles of cassava leaf, live chickens, and women frying badjias — bean fritters — in cut-open oil drums. Loud, cheap and entirely local.
The garden of Mozambique's oldest artists' collective doubles as a shaded bar where sculptors drink cold 2M lager under mango trees, and a small kitchen turns out grilled chicken and matapa with xima from early evening.
The 1920s café still serves galão in glass cups, rissóis de camarão and prego rolls under slow ceiling fans. Marble tables, waistcoated waiters and a pastry counter that is picked clean by mid-morning.
Half a chicken grilled over coals and drenched in coconut-and-chilli sauce is why this plain dining room has drawn queues since the 1970s. Frango à Zambeziana arrives with chips, rice and a jug of extra sauce.
Afternoon tea on the terrace of the 1922 hotel that gave the cake its name: bolo polana is a dense cashew-and-potato cake, served with tea while the Indian Ocean fills the view beyond the pool lawns.
A Marginal seafood house where arroz de marisco and grilled lulas come out on wooden boards and the terrace catches the sea breeze. Prawns are weighed at your table before cooking, so you see exactly what you pay for.
A guided walk through the reed-and-tin quarter that raised Eusébio and Samora Machel, stopping at home kitchens for badjias, mucapata — rice cooked with mung beans and coconut — and a shot of sugarcane tontonto.
Polana's open-sided corner canteen has served the same long menu of peri-peri chicken, prawn rissoles and cold 2M since the 1990s. Pavement tables stay full from noon to midnight and the kitchen never closes between services.
The century-old Casa Elefante anchors a run of lower-city shops selling bottled piri-piri, Ilha de Moçambique sea salt, Gurué black tea from the northern highlands and raw cashews scooped from open sacks by weight.
The Baixa bar pours R&R — rum and raspberry — and Tipo Tinto with Sparletta to a crowd that comes for marrabenta bands and stays for the late kitchen's grilled chicken livers and salted cashews.