Ouagadougou: spectacular name, spectacular food. James Knight and Katrina Manson, co-authors of the new Bradt Travel Guide to Burkina Faso, lick their lips and take us on a culinary tour of this relaxed and hospitable capital city.
 Wherever you are in Ouagadougou (pronounced ‘Wagadoogoo’) and whatever your budget, you can eat well, from tasty roadside brochettes (skewers of meat) to swanky haute cuisine. In fact, volunteers working in Ghana regularly make the trek to the Burkinabe culinary hotspot simply for the food. You can taste French, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Moroccan, Indian, Senegalese, Ivorian, Togolese cuisine, as well as greasy fast food and Burkinabe specialities. And the endless selection of restaurants, gardens and outdoor bars offers a brilliant bazaar of modern West African life.
Hit the streets
Meat cuts sizzle away on wooden stalls, served up in a greasy bit of brown paper with healthy pinches of can can can, a potent cocktail of pounded groundnut and chillis claimed by all to have aphrodisiac properties. For vegetarians, women char-grill fat stalks of maize on the streets; fry up plantain or beignets (starchy savoury dumplings made from ground black-eyed beans); or serve industrial-sized plates of rice and pale green baobab-leaf sauce. You can even find the odd caterpillar, as well as delicious homemade juices such as ginger, bissap (from a crushed red flower) and syrupy tamarind, which looks like slightly off-colour Coca Cola.
Maquis magic
Outdoor televisions blaring out the latest African soap, outsize So.b.bra beers standing proud on tables, enormous wooden table football stands surrounded by an 11-a-side strong team of ten-year-olds: you must be at a maquis, the trademark local bar. For the best brochettes in the country, with juicy tender barbecued beef, an array of hot sauces, and not so much as a salad leaf in sight, head for Maquis Aboussouan in the suburb of Gounghin Sud. The Paradiso, an atmospheric streetside bar in the diplomatic quarter of Zone du Bois, serves top-notch carpaccio, merguez and baked fish. The owner combines the bar with a modern art gallery, while an onsite tailor can take orders for African print shirts while you eat. With strings of lights falling from trees, Jardin de l’Amitié, hidden behind the city’s busiest intersection, offers immediate respite from the racket outside. For a grand view of the world’s only monument to film (see box), head to the Jardin du Maire, where you can eat poulet yassa (chicken with lots of onions) and pintade au rabilet (guineafowl, in a sauce that turns the normal smelly-sock odour of local seasoning soumbla into something quite delicious).
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Dining in style
Le Tiebele, off Avenue du Burkina, offers a gourmet twist on classic African staples – pork chops, the Senegalese dish poulet kedjenou and alloco (plantains fried with ginger) – in serene and stylish environs. For a cheaper and cheerful alternative, drop in at Akwaba on the main drag for the chance to try poulet yassa, and rich agouti (African bush rat), in a tasty casserole.
For the more international palette there’s a fine variety of food on offer in town, including Lebanese and north African, Chinese, good pasta, inventive pizza and even chicken tikka masala. But for something special, go glam. In the middle of Ouaga’s poshest residential quarter, Restaurant Gondwana is a treat for the eyes as much as the taste buds, and is favoured by Burkina’s glitterati, including legendary film director Gaston Kabore. Themed areas include a Mauritanian salon, Tuareg tent, a Gourounsi house and a garden, stacked with dark woods, rich cushions, and plenty of traditional and modern art for sale. Every meal is topped off with sweet mint tea.
Or there’s Villa Sikandra, a grotto of gaudy gold statues with a dribbling fountain, local musicians, contemporary art displays, and another in-house tailor. Outside dining among cushions and wispy chiffon drapes is on low tables beside traditional-style painted mud houses, or on the roof, where each dining party has something approaching its very own four-poster bed for romantic cover. The menu includes elaborate starters, tender cuts of meat, rich desserts and an ambience perfect for both aperitif and digestif.
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