Best Restaurants in Dakar
Five essential tables, ranked by occasion.
$ Under 3000 XOF$$ 3000–10000 XOF$$$ 10000–25000 XOF
Dakar’s Top 5
Sunu Makane
Sunu Makane — ‘Our Place’ in Wolof — occupies one of West Africa’s most extraordinary natural dining settings: Ngor Island, a small island off the coast of Dakar accessible by a ten-minute w...
BOMA Lifestyle Hotel Restaurant
BOMA Lifestyle Hotel’s restaurant on Route de N’Gor is one of the most visually compelling dining settings in Dakar: modern interiors of genuine design quality, situated at the edge of a shimmering pool with ...
Bidew
Bidew is located inside the Institut Français de Dakar — the French cultural institute that has been one of the city’s most important cultural spaces since Senegalese independence — and takes ful...
La Dagorne
La Dagorne has built a reputation as Dakar’s most reliable fine dining address through the combination of genuinely delicious food and incredibly attentive service that the city’s business community has adopt...
Reine Margarita
Reine Margarita is a charming Italian eatery with a menu entirely in Italian — a statement of culinary principle in a city where most restaurants hedge their identity toward the widest possible tourist appeal. The ...
Lagon I
Lagon I is a Dakar institution: a beachfront restaurant on the Almadies peninsula that has been serving Senegalese seafood and traditional dishes to the city’s population for five decades. The consistency of its qu...
Dining in Dakar — The Essential Guide
West Africa’s Culinary Capital
Dakar is the westernmost city in continental Africa — a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic at the point where the continent ends and the ocean begins. The city’s geographical position has shaped its food culture as fundamentally as its Senegalese identity: the Atlantic provides the freshest seafood in West Africa; the Francophone culinary tradition provides the technical framework; and the Senegalese flavour vocabulary — the dijon-spiked yassa, the tomato-rich thieboudienne, the peanut-based mafé — provides the specific character that makes Dakar one of the world’s most compelling dining cities for those willing to go beyond the tourist circuit.
Saveur magazine has identified Dakar as one of the world’s most surprising dining destinations, and the assessment reflects the genuine quality available at tables ranging from Sunu Makane on Ngor Island to La Dagorne’s reliable fine dining and Bidew’s colorful French-Senegalese fusion.
Thieboudienne and the Senegalese Table
Thieboudienne — rice cooked in a rich tomato-based stew with fish and vegetables, arguably the national dish of Senegal — is one of the great African dishes: the preparation technique varies by region and family, but at its best it achieves a complexity of flavour — the fish stock-enriched rice, the slow-cooked vegetables, the tomato reduction, and the fish that has flavoured everything — that the most accomplished European fish dishes rarely match. BOMA and Lagon I both serve it; Sunu Makane’s yassa is its companion in the pantheon of Senegalese seafood greatness.
Ngor Island
Ngor Island is a ten-minute pirogue ride from the Ngor beach — a small inhabited island off the Almadies coast that has no cars, approximately 1,500 permanent residents, and a handful of restaurants serving the freshest fish available on the Atlantic coast of Africa. The journey to Sunu Makane — the wooden boat, the fishermen’s nets drying on the shore, the smell of the ocean — constitutes the most complete expression of what Dakar dining can be.