Best Restaurants in Livingstone
Five essential tables, ranked by occasion.
$ Under 100 ZMW | $$ 100–400 ZMW | $$$ 400–1,200 ZMW | $$$$ Over 1,200 ZMW
Livingstone’s Top 5
The Royal Livingstone Hotel Restaurant
The Royal Livingstone is the closest hotel to Victoria Falls on the Zambian side — so close that the spray from the Falls creates a perpetual rainbow visible from the terrace and soaks the garden lawn that zebras and gir...
Olga's Italian Kitchen
Olga's Italian Kitchen is Livingstone's most celebrated independent restaurant — a genuine Italian kitchen run with the passion that only a personal project achieves. The pasta is made fresh daily; the sauces are prepare...
Ngoma Restaurant at Tongabezi
Tongabezi Lodge sits on the Zambezi River 17 kilometres upstream from Victoria Falls, a position that provides the river's full power without the tourist infrastructure of the Falls area. The lodge's Ngoma Restaurant is ...
Café Zambezi
Café Zambezi serves the practical need of a town that receives thousands of visitors on their way to Victoria Falls — a reliable, welcoming, all-day café that provides good coffee, food that works from breakfast through ...
Zamba Road Grill
Zamba Road Grill is the local answer to the tourist lodges — a straightforward outdoor grill and local food restaurant that serves Livingstone's working population with the unpretentious quality that the town's own resid...
Livingstone Island Picnic
Livingstone Island is a small island in the middle of the Zambezi River, metres from the edge of Victoria Falls — the point from which David Livingstone first viewed the Falls in 1855 and gave them the name that persists...
Dining in Livingstone
Livingstone is Zambia's most visited city and the gateway to Victoria Falls — Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World and the largest waterfall on earth by volume. The city takes its name from the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, who was brought here by his Makololo guides in 1855 and became the first European to view the Falls. The dining scene reflects both the extraordinary natural context and the tourist infrastructure that surrounds it.
Southern African Bush Cuisine
Livingstone's high-end lodge restaurants serve the southern African game cuisine tradition at its most refined — kudu, warthog, and the regional game animals prepared with classical technique and presented in the bush-luxury setting that the international lodge circuit has developed. The Zambezi River provides bream and other freshwater fish of excellent quality. The braai (barbecue) tradition, shared with Zimbabwe across the border, is practised with serious dedication at every level of the market.
Zambian Food
Zambia's national food is nshima — a thick maize porridge eaten with relishes of vegetables, beans, or fish. Kapenta (small dried fish, sourced from lakes Kariba and Tanganyika) is the most common and most characteristically Zambian protein. Nshima with kapenta and a green vegetable relish is the national comfort food, available at local restaurants and roadside eateries throughout the city.
The Zambezi Experience
The Zambezi River provides Livingstone with its most distinctive dining experiences. Sunset cruises, riverside lodge dinners, and the extraordinary Livingstone Island picnic at the edge of Victoria Falls represent a range of waterborne dining experiences unavailable anywhere else in the world. The Falls themselves — audible from much of the town and visible in their full vertical 108-metre drop from the Zambian side — provide a backdrop that no interior restaurant can approximate.
Practical Notes
Livingstone uses the Zambian Kwacha. The city is safe and well-organised for tourism. Harry Mwanga Nkumbula International Airport has connections to Lusaka and Johannesburg. Most lodge restaurants are fully-inclusive; independent restaurants in the town centre offer considerably more affordable alternatives. The best wildlife and Falls experiences are concentrated between May and November.