Port Sudan eats what the Red Sea lands that morning. Hamour and kingfish go straight from the harbour auction to charcoal grills, Beja coffee ladies spice jebena pots with ginger and clove, and every meal comes with aysh or kisra.
Landings start around 05:30 and the auction runs to mid-morning: hamour, kingfish, parrotfish, barracuda and Red Sea prawns sold by weight on wet concrete. Buy your fish, then hand it to the grill men at the back.
The central market's breakfast-into-lunch corner serves ful medames mashed with sesame oil, white cheese and green chilli, plus taamiya fried to order. Bowls are communal, eaten with torn aysh baladi flatbread.
Women set out low stools and charcoal braziers along the shaded pavement, roasting green beans on the spot and brewing jebena coffee spiced with ginger, cardamom and clove, poured through palm fibre into thimble cups.
Residential Deim al-Arab bakes the city's aysh baladi in wood-fired ovens, sold hot from late afternoon. Household kitchens sell stacks of kisra — fermented sorghum crepes cooked on a hot doka plate for the evening meal.
The seafront hotel terrace serves the fullest Sudanese breakfast in town: ful with samna, fried liver with cumin, salata aswad of smoked aubergine and peanut butter, honey, and endless glasses of shai bil laban.
A row of tin-roofed grill shacks behind the fish market split whole hamour, rub it with salt, cumin and lime, and lay it over charcoal. Served on newspaper with aysh, shatta chilli paste and raw onion in vinegar.
Agashe is beef or mutton coated in ground peanut, chilli and spice, then grilled on skewers over open coals. Stalls fire up mid-afternoon along the main commercial street and serve with lime and raw onion.
One of the few sit-down dining rooms doing full Sudanese mullah: waika thickened with dried okra, mullah rob with fermented milk, and bamia stew, all mopped up with kisra rather than rice, plus grilled Red Sea fish.
Where lorry drivers from Kassala and Atbara eat before the desert run: sheets of sorghum kisra layered into bowls of okra or peanut stew, eaten by hand from a shared tray, finished with sour rob milk.
Sixty kilometres south beside the coral ruins, boats tie up at the causeway and small kitchens grill the morning catch — reef snapper, prawns and squid — with tamarind and chilli, served under palm shade by the water.
Beja and Hadendoa traders take coffee in the souk's craft alleys: beans roasted with ginger, pounded in a wooden mortar with clove and black pepper, brewed in a clay jabana and drunk in three successive rounds.
Evening drinking here means juice: mango and guava blended to order, karkade steeped cold and sweetened, tabaldi baobab whisked with milk, and asir limun with mint, sold from carts as families walk the seafront.