Food guide
Eating Cape Verde: the Devil Inside a Pastry
Cachupa, Cape Verde's national dish, is already a familiar name to most visitors before they arrive. Less familiar: a fried pastry with a memorable name, a corn couscous unrelated to its North African namesake, and the honeyed cocktail built on grogue.
Updated 2026-08-16
Pastel com Diabo Dentro: “Pastry With the Devil Inside”
Pastel com diabo dentro is Cape Verde's own take on a fried savoury pastry, its dramatic name referring to a filling of shredded tuna mixed with onion, tomato and chilli, spiced enough to justify the “devil” in the name without being genuinely fierce by most standards. Sold hot from street vendors, market stalls and casual café counters across the islands, it's one of Cape Verde's most reliable, inexpensive snacks — a crisp fried exterior giving way to a soft, savoury filling — and a genuinely fun bit of culinary theatre for visitors encountering the name for the first time before they know what's actually inside.
Cuscuz: a Corn Couscous, Not the North African Kind
Despite sharing a name with North African couscous, Cape Verdean cuscuz is a genuinely different dish, made from ground corn rather than semolina wheat, steamed into a dense, slightly sweet cake-like preparation often eaten at breakfast alongside coffee or as an accompaniment to a main meal. The corn base reflects the islands' own agricultural staples rather than any direct culinary borrowing from North Africa — maize has long been a core crop across Cape Verde's more arable islands, Santiago's own highland interior chief among them — and cuscuz is one of the more distinctively Cape Verdean ways that staple gets used at the table.
Ponche: Grogue Turned Festive
Ponche takes grogue — the sugarcane spirit distilled by hand in the Paúl Valley's small stone alembics — and turns it into a celebratory drink by mixing it with honey and citrus, typically lime, producing something considerably softer and more approachable than grogue on its own. It's the drink most associated with festivals, weddings and other celebratory occasions across the islands, a genuine social ritual rather than a tourist cocktail invention, and trying it alongside a straight grogue tasting gives a fuller sense of the spirit's range — from raw and agricultural to sweetened and festive — than either drink shows on its own.