Eating in Oman: Kahwa, Halwa and the Pit Oven

Coffee, dates and a sweet you eat with a spoon

Arriving anywhere in Oman — a house, a shop, an office, sometimes a hire-car desk — produces coffee. Omani kahwa is pale rather than dark, brewed light and heavily scented with cardamom, often with rosewater or a thread of saffron, and served in small handleless cups poured about a third full. The pouring is deliberate: your cup is refilled as long as you hold it out, and the signal that you have had enough is to give it a small shake as you hand it back. Dates come with it, always, and you take one.

The other half of the ritual is halwa, which in Oman means something quite unlike the crumbly sesame block sold under that name elsewhere. It is a dense, glossy, slow-cooked paste of starch, sugar, ghee, rosewater and cardamom, usually studded with nuts, cooked for hours in a large pan with someone stirring it more or less continuously. It is eaten in small quantities with a spoon or with fingers, straight from a communal dish, and it is sweet in a way that startles people the first time. Refusing the whole sequence politely is possible; refusing it and being believed is harder.

Shuwa, and the oven in the ground

Shuwa is the dish Omanis will tell you about first, and it is defined by its cooking rather than its ingredients. Meat — goat, or lamb, sometimes camel — is rubbed with a dark spice paste, wrapped in palm or banana leaves, and lowered into a pit dug in the ground and lined with hot stones and embers. The pit is sealed over with earth and left for a day, often two. When it is opened, the meat is soft enough to fall apart under a hand and carries the smell of the leaves and the smoke as much as the spice.

The point of shuwa is that nobody makes it for one person. The pit is a community effort, associated above all with Eid, when families and neighbourhoods cook together and open the pits on a set day — which is why the dish belongs to occasions rather than to menus. Restaurants do serve it, and it is worth ordering if you see it, but the version made properly in a pit for a festival is a different thing and travellers who happen to be invited to one should go.

What people actually eat the rest of the time

Day to day, the staple is spiced rice with meat — a slow-cooked, gently aromatic dish of rice, chicken, mutton or fish with onion, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and dried lime, served on a large communal platter and eaten with the right hand from the edge inward. It is closer to Yemeni and Gulf cooking than to Indian, with much less chilli heat than visitors expect; the flavour is warm and sour rather than hot.

On the coast, fish is the better order almost everywhere. Kingfish is the standard, tuna and snapper are common, and the plainest treatment — grilled whole over charcoal with lime — is usually the best thing on the table. In the south, whole fish is spit-roasted and served on rice cooked with lemon, which is Dhofar's own version of the same idea. Bread is a thin, wide, crisp sheet cooked on a domed griddle and torn to scoop with, and the everyday street food is mishkak: small cubes of meat on wooden skewers over coals, brushed with a spiced sauce, sold from carts in the evening and eaten standing up.

Breakfast and late-night eating both lean on the South Asian side of the country's kitchen — parathas, omelettes, chai boiled with milk and cardamom in small cafés that open early and stay open late. These places are cheap, everywhere, and consistently good.

Where the flavours come from

Two ingredients explain a lot of Omani cooking. The first is the dried lime — a whole lime boiled and left to dry until it is hard, dark and hollow, then pierced and dropped into stews and rice, where it releases a sour, faintly fermented, slightly bitter note that is the single most identifiable flavour in the region's food. The second is rosewater, which turns up in coffee, in halwa and in sweets, and which is distilled in the mountain villages from the spring rose harvest.

The rest arrived by sea. Centuries of trade along the East African coast brought spice combinations, coconut and cooking techniques back into Omani kitchens, and the traffic with the Persian and Indian coasts brought rice varieties, flatbreads, chai and the skewer-and-charcoal habit. What is striking is how thoroughly these were absorbed rather than kept separate: the result is not a country with several cuisines side by side but one kitchen that quietly took what it liked from a long trading life.

A practical note on Ramadan: during the fasting month, eating, drinking and smoking in public during daylight is not done, and many restaurants close until sunset. Hotels serve visitors discreetly throughout. In the evenings the country eats extremely well and very late, and being invited to an iftar is the most generous thing that can happen to a traveller here.