Want to know the secret to finding the best authentic Zanzibar food?

I traveled to Zanzibar dozens of times before I discovered where to find authentic Swahili food.

I realized that the lunch menus at the Zanzibar hotels and restaurants, like on the signboard in my photo, were not offering traditional foods. Common Zanzibar lunch offerings for tourists include pasta, salad, wraps, chips, and lobster.

All delicious choices, but are you seeing any traditional Swahili food on the menus? Probably not!

At night, I loved to visit Forodhani Gardens, the night market in Stone Town. Here you can indulge on skewers of prawns, huge crab claws, and “Zanzibar pizza.” The food market definitely has an amazing atmosphere, but I also struggled to find traditional Swahili foods here. I found a few options, like coconut breads, but for the most part, this is not the place to find authentic Zanzibar food.

Many hotels and restaurants Westernize their menus to cater to tourists. So to find Swahili food, I usually had to walk a few blocks away from the beach to find the local restaurants.

These local menus often have choices such as biryani, pilau, urojo, muhogo, ndizi ya nyama, supu ya pweza, and mchicha. However, if you don’t speak Swahili, it can be daunting to blindly order off the menu without any idea of what you will eat. Particularly if you have food allergies or special diet requirements. It’s definitely fun to explore new foods, but easier if you have a local friend to explain the menus to you.

The traditional Swahili food can only be found in local homes. No matter where you travel, Mom’s cooking is always the best. And Zanzibar sure loves mothers!

There is a khanga saying “Baraka zitasimama tukimsahau mama” – Blessings will stop if we forget Mother. Even the current Tanzanian president, Her Excellency Samia Suluhu Hassan, is respectfully referred to as “Mama Samia” by the nation.

Many women are not included in the Zanzibar tourism sector, so you could spend an entire vacation without meeting any amazing mamas on the islands.

How can you get an invitation to eat in a local home? It’s easy! Jiranileo has a network of hosts across both Zanzibar islands, Unguja and Pemba, who welcome you into their home for a traditional Swahili meal.

Our hand-picked hosts are mothers, grandmothers, loving aunties and the matriarchs of their neighborhoods. Each of our hosts are born and raised in Unguja or Pemba, with longstanding generational links to the islands, and they all love to cook traditional Swahili food.

At a Jiranileo meal, you will eat a relaxing lunch or dinner on the mat with their families and try the variety of dishes that they cook every day in their kitchens. There is no menu. The host decides what to cook based on what is fresh that day.

You can expect a seafood dish, but not a recipe like you would find in the hotel restaurant. You will try at least two local vegetable dishes. Our hosts cook one starch, which could be a traditional rice, breadfruit, or banana recipe. And we always serve fresh juice, which is very Zanzibari!

As you eat together, you can ask all the questions you want about the food. You can try foods you didn’t know existed, learn the names and ingredients of local dishes, and even go home with recipes. When you book, let us know if you have any food allergies or diet requirements, and we will manage this with the host so that you can eat stress-free. We can always replace a fish or meat dish with a vegan dish.

While there, you can ask for a peek into their kitchens see traditional Zanzibar cooking utensils, like the mbuzi for grinding coconut, pans for making vitumbuwa, and their gas cylinder stoves or charcoal stoves (“jiko”).