Vanuatu
Laplap from the earth oven, coconut crab, and the Pacific's strongest kava at dusk.
The national dish of Vanuatu is laplap: grated yam, taro or manioc mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves and baked for hours over hot stones in an earth oven, often around fish or island cabbage. It's Sunday-and-special-occasion food, because it takes all day. Everything here is built on root crops and breadfruit bound by coconut cream, cooked slow — baked, steamed, boiled, rarely fried. The prize catch is the coconut crab, the world's largest land crab, buttery from its coconut diet.
A dual French-and-British colonial past leaves odd, charming traces — French bread, and reef snapper called poulet. But the real ritual is kava, and Vanuatu's is famously the strongest in the Pacific. As the sun drops, locals gather at a nakamal — Port Vila alone has hundreds — to drink a shell in the near-dark, often chased with a cold Tusker among friends.
- Laplap (root-vegetable and coconut bake)
- Tuluk (cassava-wrapped meat roll)
- Simboro (stuffed taro leaves)
- Bougna (earth-oven fish and root veg)
- Nalot (pounded breadfruit pudding)
- Coconut crab
- Kava
