Open air restaurants cook the seafood you buy when you shop in Maputo's vibrant Mercado de Peixe
Slivery rows of motionless sea bass, with their tails hanging over the table edges, lie alongside soft pyramids of large prawns, while enormous lobsters scuttle for an escape. Bountiful seafood – calamari, kingfish and red snapper – only hours ago in the ocean, are stretched out with vacant eyes. Women dressed in vibrant capulanas and headscarves lean against the wet tiled tables, water buckets and bowls at their side. Among the shouting and trading, dealers beckon us to their stalls, each one promising bigger, tastier and better value fish than the last; local shoppers shout prices across to each other and a few tourists wander, trying to decide which stall to buy from.
Mercado de Peixe, on the northern coast of Maputo, is no ordinary place to buy your fish: its secret is the open air restaurants that lie adjacent to the market that cook the fish you buy. Wooden benches or plastic chairs on well-worn tables are surrounded by little kitchens with outdoor coal fires. But before we can taste the day's catch, we have to haggle a good price for the fish.
We choose a stall run by two cheerful sisters and order kilos of delicious-looking prawns. They are then taken to be weighed in a black plastic bag that sways from a single hook. As we are told a price, our waitress runs over and bursts the bag with her knife. Water, and small stones, come gushing out – not an uncommon story among foreign visitors. If it hadn't been for our waitress, we'd have been eating far fewer prawns. Our prawn seller refills our bag to its correct weight but it is all done with good humour and a Mozambican smile.
We wait patiently at the restaurant, sampling Mozambican beer and wine from South Africa while children run around, lovers hold hands and locals hang out. The restaurants fill up fast. As one party leaves there is always another to take its place.
A feast, grilled over coals, arrives. The aromas of a classic Mozambican dish hover around us: prawns cooked with lemon, garlic and parsley. The other two dishes have added peri peri – chilli peppers – and are served with the tails left on.
When dusk falls, lanterns light the area and the beat of Mozambican music adds to the atmosphere. The nearby beach is an ideal place to savour contentedness, and drop in for a caipirinha cocktail en route home.
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