Dholl Puri Sells Out by Two: Rules for Eating Across Mauritius

Most people arrive in Mauritius on a half-board package and eat two, maybe three, of their fourteen dinners outside the hotel gate. It is the most expensive economy available on this island, because Mauritian cooking was never a resort cuisine. It was assembled in market halls, in Sino-Mauritian shophouses, in Bhojpuri kitchens behind the cane fields and on plantation verandas, and a great many of the places that still cook it that way are shut by the time a resort dining room switches its lamps on.

The island eats to a timetable worth learning before you land. Port Louis and the towns strung out behind it are lunch places. The market stalls, the dholl puri vendors and the better Chinese kitchens do their trade between mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and the capital empties after office hours. The coasts run the opposite way: Grand Baie barely stirs before evening. The Chamarel plateau in the southwest does neither, serving lunch and then closing, because the road down is winding and unlit and nobody wants to drive it after dark.

Get that sequence right and you will eat remarkably well for very little money. Get it wrong and you will spend a fortnight concluding that the buffet does a reasonable rougaille.

Four kitchens, one plate

Mauritian food is the product of four traditions that never fully merged and never fully separated, and knowing which one you are ordering from saves a lot of confusion at the table.

Creole cooking, with African and Malagasy roots, gives you rougaille (a tomato, thyme and onion base built around sausage, fish or eggs), cari, bouillon, and vindaye, in which fish or octopus is cooked with mustard seed, turmeric and vinegar and is usually better cold the next day. Indo-Mauritian cooking, brought by indentured labourers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, gives you dholl puri, farata, briyani and gateaux piments, the split-pea fritters sold by the handful in paper cones. Sino-Mauritian cooking, largely Hakka and Cantonese in origin, gives you mine frite, boulettes and bol renverse. The French colonial register survives mostly in the old restaurants of the west coast: palm heart salad, gibier, cream sauces.

If you eat one thing here, make it dholl puri. Two thin flatbreads stuffed with ground yellow split peas are griddled to order, folded around butter-bean curry, rougaille, grated cucumber and a chilli paste called mazavaroo, and handed over in wax paper. They are always sold in pairs, and a pair costs somewhere in the region of thirty to forty rupees, which is to say almost nothing. They also sell out. A good stall will be empty by early afternoon, which is the single most important sentence in this guide.

Port Louis, where you need to be before noon

The Central Market is the correct first meal of any trip. The stalls clustered outside the main hall are where the dholl puri and the roti vendors work, and the upstairs food court is where you sit down to a plate of cari or mine with a paper napkin situation that will not entirely cope. Go mid-morning, when the produce is still being arranged and the queues have not yet formed. Order gateaux piments while you wait, which cost a few rupees each and are eaten hot, and then an alouda: a cold, milky, faintly rose-scented drink thickened with basil seeds and strips of agar jelly, closer to a Persian falooda than to a milkshake, and sold from carts around the market for roughly forty rupees. In February it is the only sane response to the heat.

The Caudan Waterfront, a short walk across the motorway footbridge, is where Port Louis does sit-down lunch. La Bonne Marmite is the useful one, split across two levels, with a ground floor of hot dishes and salads that works as a quick canteen and a more composed dining room above it. Le Courtyard nearby leans French with a Mauritian accent and keeps a sommelier on the floor, which makes it the place to spend money if you want to. Namaste covers the Indian side.

Practical notes that will save you an hour: parking in central Port Louis is genuinely miserable, so take a taxi or have your driver drop you at the market and collect you at Caudan. The city quietens sharply in the late afternoon on weekdays, Saturday trading tends to stop around midday, and on Sundays most of it is closed. Port Louis is a place you visit for breakfast and lunch, and leave.

Chinatown, and the case for ordering noodles

The Chinese quarter sits just uphill from the market behind its pair of ceremonial gates, and it is one of the few parts of the capital with a real evening. This is where you order mine frite, the fried egg noodle that is arguably the island's true everyday staple, and boulettes: steamed dumplings of fish, chicken, chayote or pork, served a few at a time in a clear broth with soy and chilli on the side. Order several rounds. Nobody eats boulettes as a single dish.

Lai Min has been a fixture of the quarter for decades and does straightforward mine, fried rice and bol renverse, the upturned bowl of rice, stir-fried meat and a fried egg that is a genuinely Mauritian invention rather than an import. For a full Cantonese spread there rather than a quick plate, it is worth calling several days ahead. First Restaurant, which bills itself as the quarter's original, is the one with the old lamps and the vintage wallpaper, and Grand Canton and Moy Zhou, the latter tucked into the Heritage Court complex, are both reliable. Expect a substantial lunch for two to land somewhere around six hundred to a thousand rupees.

The lunch belt behind the capital

The conurbation running inland from Port Louis through Rose Hill, Quatre Bornes, Vacoas and Curepipe is where most Mauritians actually live, and it eats better than the coast. Ask anyone on the island where to find dholl puri and the answer will almost always be Dewa, whose stalls around Rose Hill have made the family name a shorthand for the dish. Arrive at the beginning of the lunch hour and expect a queue; arrive at three and expect nothing.

Quatre Bornes runs two overlapping markets, and it matters which one you turn up for. The food market generally trades on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the textile market on Thursdays and Sundays, and it is the weekend bazaar that draws the crowds for briyani, hot farata and local sweets from early in the morning. On the east side of the island, the Flacq market is open most days but is at its fullest on Wednesdays and Sundays. Take cash, take small notes, and eat standing up.

One more thing to look for in these towns: napolitaines, two shortbread biscuits sandwiched with jam and sealed under a lid of pink icing, sold by every decent bakery and completely unlike anything else in the region.

Table d'hote, and why you should book one early

The best meal of a Mauritian trip is very often a table d'hote, a home kitchen that takes bookings and serves a set spread family-style. Escale Creole, in the Moka hills in the middle of the island, is the one people come back for: it generally serves lunch only, on weekdays, on a long veranda with gingham cloths, and you must call ahead because there is no walking in. Chez Tante Athalie, on an old sugar estate near Pamplemousses, works the same way over a slightly longer week, typically at midday only.

What arrives is five or six dishes at once and a stack of rice. A rougaille, a cari, a bouillon of greens, a salted-fish salad, achards, chatinis of tomato or coconut, and something involving green papaya. You serve yourself, repeatedly. Budget somewhere around twelve hundred to eighteen hundred rupees a head, book at least a few days out, and do not schedule anything strenuous afterwards.

The north, which does not start until seven

Grand Baie is the island's evening. It is also its most touristed strip, and you should expect to pay roughly double the capital's prices for the same dish. Le Capitaine, which the restaurant says has been running on the bay since 1989, is the seafood address: order whatever is whole and grilled, plus a palm heart salad if it appears on the board. Happy Rajah, in the Super U complex in the middle of the village, is run by North and South Indian chefs and is a considerable step up from the generic curry houses along the coastal road. Reckon on fifteen hundred to two and a half thousand rupees a head for a seafood dinner with wine, less than half that at Happy Rajah.

The rule for the north is to be suspicious of anywhere on the main strip advertising in four languages with photographs of the food.

The west, from the coast up to the plateau

Tamarin and Black River are where the island's French colonial cooking survives most intact. La Bonne Chute in Tamarin, which describes itself as the oldest restaurant on the west coast, is the place for gibier, the local game. Mauritian deer is at its best during the hunting season, which runs roughly from June into September, so this is a cool-season order rather than a summer one. Medium Rare nearby does steak and ribs for anyone travelling with teenagers, and Moon Bar'k is a bar and kitchen on a boat in Tamarin Bay, which is better for sunset and tapas than for a serious dinner. Pavillon de Jade at Trois Bras in Black River is the west coast's long-standing Chinese kitchen. Further north along the same coast, Flic en Flac has Zub Express for Indian, Chinese and Mauritian plates at sensible prices, and Chez Pepe for Italian with a sea view.

Then climb. The Chamarel plateau, a few hundred metres above the coast, is lunch country and should be treated as a half-day. Le Chamarel Restaurant serves a Creole set lunch it calls La Table Creole, typically from around noon into the middle of the afternoon, looking out over the lagoon towards Le Morne; book it. L'Alchimiste, the restaurant inside the Rhumerie de Chamarel, opens for lunch most of the week and builds its menu around estate produce, including a pork dish braised in the distillery's own rum. La Varangue sur Morne is the third option, with the mountain view rather than the sea one. A set lunch on the plateau will run to around two thousand rupees a head. Combine any of them with the distillery tour and the coloured earths, eat at midday, and be off the mountain road before dusk.

The south, for seafood at the cliff edge

The south coast has no lagoon, so the sea arrives at the rocks with some force, and the cooking is correspondingly plainer and better. Chez Rosy, a family-run place by the black cliffs at Gris Gris near Souillac, is the one to build a drive around: octopus curry, vindaye, grilled fish, served without ceremony. Le Batelage, in a restored building beside the old port at Souillac, is the alternative if Rosy is full. Both are lunch propositions.

Putting a week of it together

Hire a car. Distances are short but the roads are slow and the drive is on the left; Port Louis to Grand Baie takes about forty-five minutes clear of traffic, Port Louis to Chamarel closer to an hour and a half. Avoid the capital entirely at rush hour.

The simplest workable pattern is to spend mornings inland and evenings on the coast. One day for the Central Market and Chinatown, one for a table d'hote in Moka or Pamplemousses, one for the Chamarel plateau with the distillery, one built around whichever market is trading that morning, and the rest on the beach with dinner in Grand Baie or Tamarin depending on which side you are staying.

On cost: a street lunch is comfortably under two hundred rupees a head, a town sit-down four to seven hundred, a table d'hote twelve to eighteen hundred, a resort-strip dinner whatever you let it be. Carry cash for anything that does not have a dining room.

On season: the cooler, drier months from May to December are the better half of the year for travelling here generally, and they happen to carry the game season as well. Litchis appear around the turn of the year and mangoes through the southern spring and summer, so the fruit calendar and the weather calendar pull in opposite directions.

And on what to skip: the hotel Creole night, every time. It is a version of this food arranged for people who will never leave the property, and you have a car.