Food guide
Rice Under a Sauce: What to Eat and Drink in Guinea
In Guinea a meal means rice, and the cooking goes into the sauce ladled over it. Rice is the constant from the coast to the forest; the sauce changes with the region, the season and what the market had that morning. Outside the hotels of Conakry a visitor eats where Guineans eat — at stalls and in small eating places — and orders in French or by pointing at the pot.
Updated 2026-10-05
Leaf sauce, groundnut sauce and okra
The sauce most often met is leaf sauce: cassava leaves, or sweet potato leaves, pounded fine and cooked for a long time in red palm oil with fish or meat until dark and thick. Groundnut sauce is the other everyday pot — ground peanuts simmered with tomato and onion around beef, chicken or fish into a heavy orange-brown sauce. Okra sauce, thickened by the sliced pods, is the third; chilli goes into the pot or comes on the side.
Grilled and smoked fish on the coast
Along the coast the meal is often fish, grilled whole over charcoal, fried or cooked into the sauce. In Conakry grilled fish comes with attiéké, a fine couscous of fermented cassava from neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire, with sliced onion, tomato and chilli, and at the fishing port of Boulbinet the day's catch is grilled beside the boats that land it. Smoked fish, dried over wood fires until hard, is sold in every market and flavours sauces far inland.
Milk and fonio in the Fouta Djallon
The Fouta Djallon highlands are cattle country, and their Pular cooking makes much of milk: fresh or soured, drunk on its own or poured over a steamed meal of maize or fonio. Fonio, a tiny grain grown in the highlands and in Upper Guinea, is steamed light like couscous and eaten with milk or with a sauce; it is the grain to ask for here. Rice and the leaf and groundnut sauces are eaten in the Fouta as everywhere else.
Upper Guinea and the forest region
In Upper Guinea, the savanna of the upper Niger basin around Kankan, rice is grown in the river plains, and a stiff porridge of millet or maize, tô, is eaten with a sauce, as it is across the border in Mali. In the forest region of the south-east, red palm oil is pressed locally and runs deep through the sauces. Kola trees grow there too, and the bitter nuts are offered to guests and exchanged at weddings and other ceremonies across the country; coffee comes from the hills around Macenta.
Street food and small eating places
Street food runs from early morning into the night. Breakfast is bread — the long French loaf is baked across the country — split and filled with an omelette, or fried dough balls, beignets, bought warm by the bagful. Later come grilled meat skewers, fried plantain, maize roasted on the cob in the rainy season, and groundnuts roasted in their shells.
For a sit-down meal, small eating places cook one or two dishes for midday and serve them until the pot runs out. Conakry adds hotel restaurants with French and international cooking, and Lebanese places for grilled meat, salads and flatbread. Stalls and eating places take cash in Guinean francs, and small notes save a wait for change.
Juices, tea and palm wine
The drinks at the stalls are made in the kitchen: ginger juice, sweet with a burn in the throat, and bissap, the deep red juice of hibiscus flowers, both sold chilled. Fruit follows the seasons — mangoes, pineapples, oranges and bananas — and is sold at every market. Tea is a slow, social habit among friends: green tea brewed strong and sweet in a small pot and poured from a height into small glasses, round after round. In the forest region palm wine is tapped from the trees and drunk fresh, the same day.