Best Restaurants in Port Louis
Five essential tables, ranked by occasion.
$$ MUR 300–1000$$$ MUR 1000–3000$$$$ Over MUR 3000
Port Louis’s Top 5
Sailors Restaurant
Sailors Restaurant is nestled in the heart of Port Louis as a fine dining establishment that guarantees a perfect marriage of fine dining, art, and a palatial culinary experience. The combination of the waterfront settin...
La Boussole
La Boussole is located in the Wharf of Port Louis at the Caudan Waterfront — the most commercially and culturally vibrant area of the Mauritian capital — and has been registered on the map of best Mauritian t...
Château Mon Desir
Château Mon Desir surrounds diners with period elegance in a 19th-century plantation house on the grounds of the Le Chateau Golf Course: wood-panelled walls, cornicing, crystal chandeliers, gilt mirrors, and linen tablec...
Le Courtyard
Le Courtyard is among the most-often-mentioned places for dining in Port Louis — a restaurant that has built its reputation through the combination of consistent Mauritian hospitality, a beautiful setting, and cook...
La Rougaille Créole
La Rougaille Créole is the authentic Mauritian Creole restaurant in Port Louis — a kitchen that serves the rougaille (the tomato-based sauce that is the signature preparation of the Mauritian Creole traditio...
Foyer Indien
Foyer Indien is the finest Indian restaurant in Port Louis — a kitchen serving the North and South Indian cooking traditions that the Indo-Mauritian community, which constitutes approximately 67% of the island&rsqu...
Dining in Port Louis — The Essential Guide
The Indian Ocean’s Great Culinary Experiment
Mauritius is one of the most extraordinary culinary experiments in human history: an uninhabited island settled in the 17th century by the Dutch, French, and British, with enslaved Africans from Madagascar and Mozambique and indentured workers from India and China, all of whom brought their food cultures and were forced to create something new from the combination. The result is the Mauritian culinary tradition — the rougaille, the biryani, the dim sum, the dholl puri, and the seafood curries that represent the synthesis — and it is one of the most delicious accidents in the history of cooking.
Port Louis, the capital, is where this synthesis is most completely expressed. The Caudan Waterfront restaurants (La Boussole), the fine dining rooms (Sailors), the colonial plantation houses (Château Mon Desir), and the community kitchens of the Indo-Mauritian tradition (Foyer Indien) all represent different dimensions of what Mauritius has become at table over three and a half centuries.
The Five Cuisines of Mauritius
Mauritian cooking draws on five principal traditions: French (the colonial administration’s kitchen), Creole (the African and Malagasy workers’ synthesis), Indian (the majority population’s contribution, itself divided between North and South Indian traditions), Chinese (the merchant community’s kitchen), and African (the Malagasy and Mozambican traditions that the enslaved workers brought). Understanding Mauritius means eating all five; Port Louis is the only place on the island where all five are available within walking distance.