Port Vila eats like nowhere else in the Pacific: French bakeries and steak frites sit beside mama-run market kitchens, bean-to-bar chocolate from Malekula cocoa, Tanna-grown highland coffee, and smoky nakamals serving kava by the shell.
A French colonial holdover on Lini Highway. Butter croissants, baguettes and pain au chocolat come out from about 06:30, alongside espresso and quiche. Open Mon–Sat from 06:00, Sunday mornings only.
A neighbourhood market hall where mamas cook from steel pots: island cabbage in coconut milk, curried chicken, tinned-fish rice and fried reef fish, served on foam plates at shared benches. Weekday lunch trade peaks 11:30–13:00.
Vanuatu's bean-to-bar workshop roasts cocoa from Malekula, Epi and Malo smallholders. Tastings run through single-island bars plus wild pepper, coconut, vanilla and volcanic-salt editions; you can watch winnowing and tempering.
Kava bars open at sunset when a kerosene lamp is lit outside. Fresh-pounded Efate root is strained through cloth and served in coconut shells; drinkers down it in one and step outside to spit and stay quiet.
Arabica grown on Tanna's volcanic slopes is roasted here in a small drum roaster and brewed on site. The café pours flat whites and cold brew beside sacks of green bean; staff explain the smallholder buying model.
An open-sided harbour café facing Iririki. Lunch is grilled poulet fish and wahoo with lime, coconut-crusted prawns, and burgers, eaten under casuarinas with the inter-island ferries loading below.
A free two-minute ferry crosses Erakor Lagoon to a coral islet where the deck bar serves tuna tartare, coconut ceviche and cocktails mixed with local pineapple. The ferry runs on demand until late.
A long-standing French-Melanesian kitchen on stilts over the lagoon. Coconut crab, freshwater prawns, poulet fish in vanilla sauce and Santo beef fillet, with mangrove lights on the water below.
Vanuatu's French-run supermarket is a food-culture lesson: Camembert and rillettes beside Venui vanilla beans, wild-hive honey, bush-lime chilli sauce, Tusker stubbies and frozen flying-fox-country beef cuts.
Tables sit directly on the black-sand beach at Mele Bay, with a wood-fired oven turning out pizza and a grill doing whole reef fish and burgers. Hammocks, cold Tusker, and volleyball on the sand between courses.
Terraced tropical gardens above town where guides walk you past cocoa pods, vanilla vines, nutmeg, wild pepper, kava plants and island cabbage, explaining what goes into laplap and how kava is graded.
A ranch-style steakhouse serving Vanuatu grass-fed, hormone-free beef — the country's biggest export — cut thick and grilled over open flame, with horses in the paddock and a saloon bar pouring Tusker.