3 Gambian Meals You Must Try – Discovering the Food of The Gambia

Food can tell you an enormous amount about a country, and Gambian food tells you rather a lot about The Gambia.

You can, of course, visit The Gambia, stay in a hotel, eat breakfast from a buffet and spend two weeks perfectly happily choosing meals from menus written largely with European visitors in mind.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But you will be missing something.

Because some of my favourite memories of The Gambia have involved food. Not necessarily food served on carefully arranged restaurant plates, but meals eaten in family compounds, food bought beside a road, peanuts passed around during a journey and enormous bowls of rice placed in the middle of a group of people.

Over the years, I have eaten Gambian-style on many occasions.

And that often means there isn’t a plate with your name on it.

Instead, everybody gathers around one large shared bowl.

The rice, sauce, meat, fish and vegetables are arranged together and each person eats from the section immediately in front of them. Traditionally this may be done with the right hand, although spoons are certainly not unknown.

I’ve certainly tried eating Gambian style with my right hand. But, these days, a spoon tends to magically appear before I can make too much of a mess.

There is also something else I have noticed many times.

The person hosting the meal keeps an eye on everybody else.

Pieces of meat or fish have a habit of being quietly moved in your direction. Someone decides you haven’t eaten enough. Another particularly good piece mysteriously arrives in your section of the bowl.

Hospitality is being expressed without anybody needing to announce it.

I’ve always liked that.

So, if you visit The Gambia and get an opportunity to move beyond the familiar tourist menus, here are three Gambian meals I think you really should try.

1. Domoda – Peanut Sauce, Rice and Gambian Comfort Food

If I had to introduce somebody to Gambian food with just one dish, I might start with domoda.

It is one of the best-known dishes in The Gambia and is based around something that grows extremely well in the country: peanuts, usually referred to locally as groundnuts.

The result is a wonderfully rich peanut sauce, normally served with rice and accompanied by meat such as beef or chicken. Tomatoes, vegetables and seasoning vary from cook to cook, which means no two domodas are necessarily quite the same.

And that’s part of the attraction.

Restaurant domoda can arrive very neatly presented: a mound of white rice beside a carefully served helping of thick peanut sauce.

Eat it in a Gambian compound and things are likely to be rather different.

There may be a huge bowl of rice. The sauce goes over it. Everybody gathers around.

And you get stuck in.

The flavour is difficult to describe to somebody who hasn’t eaten it. It is rich and savoury rather than tasting like somebody has simply poured peanut butter over your dinner—which, I admit, isn’t an entirely enticing mental image.

A good domoda has depth to it.

The peanut gives it richness, the meat adds flavour and the sauce gradually works its way into the rice underneath.

It’s filling, comforting and extremely Gambian.

And if somebody sitting opposite you decides that the largest piece of meat in the bowl belongs to the visitor, don’t argue.

I’ve learnt that you probably won’t win.

2. Benachin – The Gambian One-Pot Meal

Then there is benachin.

You may also see it written as benechin, and the name essentially refers to the idea of cooking everything together in one pot.

That simplicity hides an enormous amount of flavour.

Rice is cooked with ingredients that can include tomato, vegetables, spices and fish or meat. The rice absorbs the stock and seasoning as it cooks, creating the characteristic colour and flavour of the finished meal.

Versions vary enormously.

Fish is particularly common and you may find vegetables such as cabbage, aubergine, cassava, carrot or peppers sitting amongst the rice.

And it looks magnificent when it arrives in a large communal bowl.

A properly presented benachin doesn’t need restaurant decoration. The food is the decoration.

A great expanse of richly coloured rice, meat or fish in the centre and large pieces of vegetables scattered across the top is quite capable of announcing itself.

Again, this is food made for sharing.

Perhaps that is one of the things I like most about Gambian cooking. The traditional meal isn’t constructed around the idea that everybody should receive their own carefully measured individual portion.

The bowl goes in the middle.

People gather around it.

And dinner becomes something you do together.

3. Yassa – Onions, Citrus and One of West Africa’s Great Dishes

My third choice is yassa.

Like so much of the culture, language and food of this part of West Africa, yassa isn’t confined by the modern border between The Gambia and Senegal. It belongs to the wider Senegambian food tradition.

Chicken yassa is probably the version most visitors will encounter.

The chicken is marinated and served with a sauce dominated by onions and citrus, often with mustard and plenty of seasoning.

And when I say onions, I mean onions.

Lots of them.

They soften down into a wonderfully sharp, sweet and savoury sauce that works beautifully with chicken and rice.

There are fish versions too, and—as with domoda and benachin—the recipe will change depending upon who is cooking it.

Yassa may also be one of the easiest traditional Gambian meals for a first-time visitor to approach.

The individual ingredients don’t sound particularly unfamiliar. Chicken, onions, lemon and rice aren’t exactly threatening territory for most British stomachs.

But put them together in the Gambian way and you have something unmistakably West African.

It is precisely the sort of meal that reminds you that sometimes the best food doesn’t depend on exotic ingredients.

It depends on what you do with them.

The Shared Bowl – Because Gambian Food Is About More Than Eating

It would be very easy to write about Gambian food simply by listing ingredients.

But that misses a large part of the experience. An experience which is built into Gambians from the day they’re born.

One of the things I have grown to love is sitting with a Gambian family and eating from a shared bowl.

Or sitting with the Official Tourist Guides on the Senegambia Strip.

Or sitting with BFiG Busumbala Nursery School Manager Lamin Barrow and his brother Lamin Darboe in the middle of the Sankandi Village countryside.

There is an etiquette to it.

You generally concentrate on the section immediately in front of you rather than excavating your way across the bowl in search of the biggest piece of chicken.

Eating traditionally with your hand is something of an acquired skill, particularly when rice is involved, and I suspect my early attempts provided considerably more entertainment to everybody else than they did nourishment to me. And this is why, now, a spoon will mysteriously find its way into my hand.

But after a while, eating from a shared bowl stops feeling unusual.

You’re simply eating together.

Children appear and disappear. Conversation continues. Somebody brings more water. Somebody else wanders across the compound. A chicken may pass by with considerably more confidence than seems appropriate for an animal potentially living amongst people who eat a great deal of chicken.

And eventually the bowl is cleared away.

The meal was important.

But so was everything happening around it.

Don’t Ignore the Tapalapa

Not every Gambian food experience requires sitting down to a large meal.

Sometimes you just need a tapalapa.

Tapalapa is the wonderfully substantial West African bread that you will find everywhere in The Gambia.

It is long, dense and slightly chewy, with far more character than the mass-produced sliced bread most of us are accustomed to in Britain.

Early in the morning, freshly baked tapalapas appear at bakeries and roadside stalls and quickly become breakfast.

Split one open and fill it with egg, beans, mayonnaise, sardines, meat or whatever happens to be available and you have one of the simplest—and most satisfying—Gambian meals there is.

They’re cheap.

They’re filling.

And they’re everywhere.

For me, the tapalapa is one of those things that hardly seems noteworthy when you first encounter it.

Then you return to Britain and find yourself missing it.

Peanuts, Cashews and the Roadside Sellers

You will not travel very far around The Gambia without encountering peanuts.

Groundnuts are an important crop, but they’re also an everyday snack.

Small bags of roasted peanuts are sold by roadside vendors, at markets, beside taxi ranks and amongst traffic. Cashew nuts are readily available too, particularly in areas where cashew trees are grown.

Often the sellers simply carry what they have with them.

You see somebody approaching with a tray balanced confidently on their head or shoulder, small transparent bags of nuts laid out across it, ready to sell to passengers and pedestrians.

Here are two young sellers who approached me a few years ago.

There is nothing remotely elaborate about the transaction.

You hand over a few dalasi.

You receive a bag of peanuts or cashews.

And five minutes later everybody in the vehicle is eating them.

For visitors who never venture beyond supermarkets and hotel shops, these tiny pieces of everyday Gambian life are very easy to miss.

They shouldn’t be.

Sometimes discovering the food of a country costs little more than the loose change in your pocket.

An Honourable Mention – Fish in Foil on the Beach

My three dishes are chosen.

But I need an honourable mention.

And this one is very personal.

Fish in foil at Solomon’s on the beach.

I don’t think anybody could accuse it of elaborate presentation.

A whole piece of fish arrives wrapped in aluminium foil.

You unwrap it.

Inside is freshly cooked fish, onions and seasoning, often accompanied by chips.

That’s pretty much it.

And it is wonderful.

Part of that, inevitably, is the setting.

You’re in The Gambia. You’re close to the Atlantic. The air is warm. The fish is fresh. Everything has been cooked together inside the foil so that the flavours and juices remain trapped inside until you open it.

There are meals that are technically more sophisticated.

There are certainly meals presented more elegantly.

But food isn’t eaten in a laboratory.

Where you are matters.

Who you’re with matters.

What you’ve been doing that day matters.

And there is something particularly satisfying about opening that foil and eating fish beside the Gambian coast.

Sometimes the best restaurant doesn’t need four walls.

And What Are We Drinking?

For many years there was an obvious answer to that question.

Julbrew.

The green bottle, with its colourful kingfisher label, became almost as familiar to regular visitors to The Gambia as the green-and-yellow taxis.

Julbrew was brewed locally by Banjul Breweries, where beer production began in 1977. For decades it really was The Gambia’s own beer.

Then it disappeared.

Banjul Breweries’ owners announced in 2020 that production would cease and the brewery would close. It brought an end to more than four decades of Julbrew being produced in The Gambia.

For those of us who had been visiting for years, it felt strangely significant.

Julbrew wasn’t merely a bottle of lager.

It was part of travelling in The Gambia.

There is, however, now a new green bottle appearing on Gambian tables.

Goldfinch.

Its label proudly says “Made in The Gambia”, and both regular Premium Lager and a stronger version are now available.

Will it ever generate the same affection as Julbrew?

That will probably take time.

Julbrew had decades to become part of people’s memories.

But I rather like the fact that, after the disappearance of one locally produced Gambian beer, another has appeared to take its place.

And yes.

I have tried it.

Purely for research purposes, obviously.

The Food I Remember

If somebody asked me to name the best meal I’ve ever eaten in The Gambia, I’m not sure I could.

I remember excellent domoda.

I remember benachin.

I remember yassa.

I remember fish being unwrapped from foil beside the beach.

I remember buying nuts from people at the roadside and tearing pieces from tapalapas.

But some of the meals I remember most clearly weren’t memorable because of what was being served.

They were memorable because of where I was sitting.

Around a shared bowl.

In somebody’s compound.

With people who had invited me to eat with them.

And every so often, while I was concentrating on my little section of rice, another piece of meat would mysteriously appear in front of me.

That, perhaps, tells you as much about food in The Gambia as any recipe ever could.

If you enjoyed discovering more of The Gambia beyond the tourist areas, you might also enjoy these articles about Gambian life, culture and education. Discover The Gambia:

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👉 20 Facts About The Gambia That Will Surprise You | Building Futures in the Gambia
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👉 Why Nursery Education Matters in The Gambia
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👉 Travels With Lamin
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👉 Help Build Brighter Futures in The Gambia
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