Zanzibar Food: What to Eat, Where, and What It Costs

Zanzibar’s food is built on 600 years of trade. Arab dhow captains brought spices from the Malabar Coast and India; Persian and Omani merchants brought rice techniques and layered meat dishes; Indian traders introduced the chickpea flours and bhajia that ended up in Urojo. What stayed behind, mixed with the coconut, cassava, and fresh fish of the East African coast, is one of the most distinctive cuisines in the Indian Ocean — and most visitors only scratch the surface of it.

I eat here year-round. Here is what is actually worth your time.

Why Zanzibar food is different

The short version: Zanzibar was the clove capital of the world. At its peak in the 19th century it produced most of the world’s clove supply and sat at the centre of the Indian Ocean spice trade. The island still grows cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, nutmeg, and turmeric — and they end up in the cooking in ways that nowhere else in sub-Saharan Africa quite replicates.

The cuisine that emerged is sometimes called Swahili coastal cooking: predominantly rice-based (about 70% of Zanzibar’s rice is imported, the rest local), heavy on coconut in three forms (fresh coconut water, grated flesh, and pressed milk), flavoured with whole spices that arrive in combinations most Western kitchens wouldn’t attempt, and built around whatever came off the boats that morning.

Most Zanzibar food is halal by default. Almost all street vendors, local restaurants, and markets operate within Islamic dietary practice. Alcohol is available at hotels and tourist-facing restaurants; it is absent from local establishments.

The dishes worth knowing

Urojo — Zanzibar Mix

The defining street dish. A spiced coconut broth — base of onion, garlic, ginger, and chili — arrives in a bowl with chunky mashed potato, crispy chickpea-flour bhajia, fried potato shavings, and a squeeze of lemon. You eat it at a communal table, standing, in under three minutes. It costs around USD 1 at Forodhani Gardens and is the single dish that most people who live here point to when asked what Zanzibar tastes like.

The texture is the thing: the smooth broth, the starchy mashed potato, the crunch of the bhajia — the combination is unexpected and very good. Order it first at Forodhani, then decide if you want it again. Most people do.

Zanzibar Pizza

Not Italian. Not even close. Zanzibar pizza is a thin, almost translucent dough stretched by hand on a flat surface, then filled with egg, minced meat, tomato, onion, green pepper, and optional avocado or cream cheese, before being folded and fried on a flat griddle. The result is flaky, slightly crispy on the outside and soft inside, and is eaten in the hand. Cost: USD 1.50–3 per piece at Forodhani.

Pilau Rice

Zanzibar pilau is a spiced rice dish that shows up at every local table. The spice blend — cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, star anise, cardamom, cumin, coriander — is whole, not powdered, and goes in with the rice at the start of cooking. The result is fragrant in a way that pilau outside East Africa rarely is. It is the backbone of Swahili cooking and the thing you will eat most often in local restaurants.

Octopus — Pweza wa Nazi

East coast Zanzibar, especially the fishing villages around Jambiani, is built around octopus. The local version worth ordering is pweza wa nazi — octopus slow-cooked in coconut milk until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick and fragrant. You also see it grilled or char-grilled at beach restaurants, which is good, but pweza wa nazi is better.

Seaside restaurants in Jambiani, Paje, and Michamvi commonly run octopus, fresh fish, lobster, and prawns. A seafood platter runs Tsh 60,000–120,000 depending on the catch.

Biryani

Zanzibari biryani is a layered rice dish: spiced coconut-milk rice, meat (usually chicken or goat), and a spice blend that includes cumin, ginger, cardamom, nutmeg, and cloves. It is richer and more fragrant than Indian biryani and served at special occasions, family restaurants, and better local spots. If you see it on a menu, order it.

Mandazi

The East African doughnut: made with a dough of flour, coconut milk, and cardamom, fried until puffed and golden, and eaten for breakfast or as a snack. Mandazi costs almost nothing from street vendors — a few hundred TZS — and pairs with chai ya tangawizi (spiced ginger tea) better than anything else at breakfast.

Tangawizi — Ginger Drinks

Chai ya tangawizi is spiced ginger tea infused with cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves. You drink it everywhere, from street stalls to hotel breakfasts. It is not subtle — the ginger is real, the cardamom is real, and it hits the back of the throat properly.

Homemade tangawizi ginger beer is the fermented version: ginger, lime, cinnamon, cloves, and a 24–48 hour ferment. You find it at some local restaurants and food markets. It is mildly alcoholic and completely different from commercial ginger beer — more astringent, more complex, served cold over crushed ice.

Forodhani Gardens night market

The waterfront market in Stone Town is the most useful food experience on the island. From around 5 PM to late, vendors set up along Forodhani Gardens on the Stone Town seafront, cooking everything in front of you. Urojo, Zanzibar pizza, mshikaki (spiced meat skewers), samosas, grilled seafood, sugarcane juice, and coconut water.

The practical rules:

• Eat where the locals are queuing. High turnover means the food is fresh. A vendor with no queue at peak time is telling you something.
• Watch the cooking. Choose stalls where food is cooked to order in front of you, not sitting in covered trays.
• Carry small bills. TZS cash; most vendors don’t take cards and change can be slow.
• Avoid tap water. Everything at the market uses ice or drinking water — ask, or stick to bottles with an unbroken seal and freshly cut fruit at stalls you can watch.

Budget Tsh 10,000–20,000 (USD 4–8) for a proper Forodhani meal with a drink.

Where to eat on the east coast

From the east coast between Michamvi, Pingwe, and Paje, the restaurant landscape is different from Stone Town. There is no Forodhani equivalent. Instead you have:

Beachfront restaurants at the lodges and independent spots. Paje has the most variety — Ocean Restaurant and Beach Bar has been the go-to beachfront venue for over a decade (opens 07:00, last orders around 21:30). SHANGA Restaurant in Paje is dinner-only: 18:00–00:00, last order 22:30. Bento in Paje runs Tsh 8,000–30,000 per dish — solid local food at east coast prices.

Fresh octopus from Jambiani. If you drive through Jambiani in the late morning, you will see octopus drying on racks by the road — the village is one of the main octopus-fishing communities on the island. The small restaurants by the beach here are worth stopping at for lunch.

Lodge dining on request. At Matlai on the east coast at Michamvi Pingwe, we run candlelit beachfront dinners with fresh seafood and a kitchen that works from local ingredients where possible. Beach dinners, private BBQs — the kind of thing that is hard to replicate at a table inside. Worth asking about when you book, not after you arrive.

Stone Town restaurants

Lukmaan Restaurant is the local benchmark: Swahili food, open from 7 AM to 9 PM, meals around 5,000 TZS. No pretension, no tourist pricing, and consistently the place other Stone Town restaurant owners eat when they are not cooking.

For the Stone Town deep-dive — the market, Darajani bazaar, the harbour — set aside a morning and eat at whatever local spot is busiest at lunchtime. The mid-morning market at Darajani is the best place to see the spice trade from the inside: clove stems, cinnamon bark, cardamom pods, and every Swahili spice that ends up in the island’s cooking.

The north coast: Nungwi and Kendwa

Nungwi and Kendwa on the island’s northwest tip have a different food culture from Stone Town — more international, more beach-bar in register, with prices that reflect the tourist concentration. The trade-off: consistent white sand underfoot and proper sunset views over flat water.

The benchmark property in the area: Breadfruit Restaurant at The Neela Boutique Hotel in Nungwi was awarded Tanzania’s Best Hotel Restaurant 2025 — not a resort buffet, but a serious kitchen in a boutique property. Worth booking a dinner there on a day trip if you are based on the east coast.

The price gradient on the north coast is worth knowing before you sit down. The same samosa that costs 7,000 TZS at a local café in Nungwi costs 14,000 TZS at a beachside restaurant — a doubling that is typical of how north coast pricing works versus Stone Town or the east coast. You are paying for the location.

What the north coast does well:

• Sunset dhow cruises from Nungwi and Kendwa depart in the late afternoon and typically include a snack; prices start from around USD 35 per person
• Beach bars running from Nungwi south to Kendwa serve fresh catches — grilled fish, calamari, whole lobster — at tables literally on the sand
• The Kendwa Full Moon Party, held monthly at Kendwa Rocks, draws large crowds; beach bars extend hours and menus, and the atmosphere is more about socializing than eating

My honest assessment: the cooking on the north coast is competent, not exceptional. The setting is the draw. For the food itself, Stone Town and the fishing villages on the east coast are more interesting. But if you are staying at Nungwi, one dinner at Breadfruit is worth the detour.

Where the ingredients come from: spice farms and Darajani Market

The most useful context for Zanzibar’s food is the one that comes before the cooking. Clove trees were introduced to Zanzibar in 1812 or 1818 — the exact date is debated — and by the mid-19th century the island was the world’s largest clove producer. Those cloves, along with cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, nutmeg, turmeric, and black pepper, define what the island’s food smells and tastes like. Understanding where they come from changes how you eat.

The spice farms that visitors tour on Unguja (the main island) are largely demonstration farms — the large-scale working farms are mostly on Pemba Island, the quieter island to the north. But the guided tours at farms near Kizimbani and Kidichi (also called Masingini Forest, outside Stone Town) are genuinely informative. A guided tour costs from USD 10 per person depending on group size. You see, smell, and taste the full spice range — and if you eat pilau rice that evening, you will recognise every note differently than you would have before.

One thing most visitors don’t know: nutmeg and mace come from the same plant. Nutmeg is the seed; mace is the red aril that wraps it. Both show up in Zanzibar’s cooking and both are sold at the farms and at Darajani.

Darajani Bazaar in Stone Town is where to buy spices to take home — and it is organized logically: separate sections for vegetables, fruits, meat, and seafood, with the spice section selling cloves, cinnamon sticks, vanilla pods, tea, coffee, and attars. The cinnamon at Darajani is typically Ceylon cinnamon, which has significantly lower coumarin content than cassia cinnamon. For regular cooking, that distinction matters.

I go to Darajani every trip. The whole-spice quality sold by weight here is considerably better than the pre-packaged tourist versions at the airport. Buy a small bag of whole cloves and a cinnamon stick; you will use them.

What things cost

Practical notes

Ramadan. Zanzibar observes Ramadan seriously. Restaurants and food stalls outside hotel compounds close during daylight hours for the month. Hotels and tourist-facing venues remain open throughout. If you travel during Ramadan, respect the daylight fast in public — and if invited to iftar (the evening meal breaking the fast), accept. It is one of the more memorable food experiences the island offers.

Vegan eating. Zanzibar is easier for vegan travellers than it might appear. Many traditional dishes are naturally plant-based: pilau with vegetable stock, coconut curries, chapati, ubuyu (baobab-seed snack), mandazi, and the gluten-free staples of maize, cassava, banana, and sweet potato that underpin rural Zanzibari cooking. Tourist restaurant menus in Paje and Nungwi now increasingly list vegan options explicitly.

Spice farm context. A Zanzibar spice tour visits working farms near Kizimbani where you see cloves, vanilla, cinnamon, and pepper growing and taste them at source. The tasting session typically includes cardamom tea, fresh Zanzibar mangoes, papaya, and jackfruit. It gives the food you eat afterwards a completely different context — worth doing early in the trip, not as an afterthought. The natural next step is a Swahili cooking class, where you cook pilau rice, coconut fish curry, and Zanzibar bread from scratch — either combined with a farm walk (from USD 20 per person at SISO Spice Farm) or as a standalone Stone Town session starting at Darajani Market.

Right hand. In Zanzibar etiquette, the right hand is used for eating and handling food. At communal tables, at street stalls, and when accepting food from a host — the left hand is considered unclean.

Paje evenings and Swahili cooking classes

East coast evenings. After dark on the east coast, the food scene is quieter than Stone Town but not absent. The Paje Beachfront Night Market runs Fridays and Saturdays from 6:30 PM, with live music, beach views, and a mix of local food stalls and handmade crafts. It is smaller than Forodhani — more of a community evening than a tourist market — and the atmosphere is worth the stop. Further south in Jambiani, The New Story is one of the best breakfast stops on the east coast: pastries, coffee, and meals served from a spot that is more café than restaurant. Jambiani’s small beachside restaurants also serve fresh octopus at prices that reflect the fishing village rather than a resort.

The east coast’s core culinary contribution is octopus. Drive through Jambiani in the late morning and you will see drying racks along the road — the fishing community here supplies Stone Town’s restaurants. Eating octopus at source, from a small restaurant twenty metres from where it was brought in, is different from ordering it at a resort. Order it grilled or ask for pweza wa nazi if they make it.

Swahili cooking classes. A hands-on cooking class is the most useful food experience on the island after Forodhani — you leave understanding why pilau rice smells the way it does, why coconut milk changes a curry’s texture, and how Urojo gets its tartness (it is the green mango).

What a standard class covers:

• Pilau rice — whole spice blend, rice technique, coconut stock
• Coconut fish curry (mchuzi wa samaki) — fresh coconut milk pressed from grated flesh
• Zanzibar bread (mkate wa ufumba) — steamed in a pot with coconut and cardamom
• Some operators include Urojo — the green mango and turmeric broth made from scratch

Costs: standalone cooking classes in Stone Town run USD 20–60+ per person depending on operator and format. The most cost-effective combination is a spice farm walk and cooking class together — SISO Spice Farm offers this from USD 20 per person. The class that starts at Darajani Market first (you buy your own ingredients) is the better format: you understand the source before you cook.

I have done a cooking class starting at Darajani and it takes a full morning. You eat what you made at the end. Worth it — particularly if you travel with someone who actually cooks at home.

The food here gets better the further you lean into it. Skip the resort buffet when you can, eat at Forodhani at least once, ask your guide or host where they eat when they are not working, and you will find something worth remembering. Zanzibar’s food is a subset of a wider Swahili coastal tradition — the Tanzania food guide covers mainland Tanzanian food culture, nyama choma, ugali, and the spiced rice traditions that reach from the coast to the Kilimanjaro foothills. For what happens after dinner — Forodhani evening, Africa House sundowner, taarab on Fridays, and the Kendwa Full Moon Party — see the Zanzibar nightlife guide. For the wider Zanzibar picture, the best things to do in Zanzibar covers where food fits into a full itinerary, and the Stone Town guide has the market, the architecture, and the afternoon context that makes a Forodhani evening land properly. For Stone Town specifically — named restaurants, prices, and the Forodhani market timing in detail — see the Stone Town restaurants and dining guide.