Food & Drink in the Guianas: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana

“The Guianas” sounds like one place with one cuisine. It is three: English-speaking Guyana, Dutch-speaking Suriname and French Guiana, which is not a country at all but part of France. Each cooks differently, so the first thing to know is which plate belongs where. This page starts with Guyanese food. If you are still choosing between the three, start with our Guianas overview.

Guyanese Food: Pepperpot, Cook-Up Rice and Curry

Guyanese food is as mixed as the country and quite different from anywhere else in South America. Amerindian, African, Creole, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese and other European cooks all left dishes behind. After slavery was abolished in 1838, planters brought indentured workers from Madeira and India; Cantonese families followed after the mid-1800s.

Pepperpot, the national dish

Pepperpot is the dish Guyanese call national, and it is Amerindian. Meat, today often oxtail, cow heel and tripe, is stewed slowly with cinnamon, cloves, hot pepper and cassareep, the juice of grated bitter cassava boiled down to a dark, semi-sweet syrup. The cassareep is the point: it flavors the stew and helps preserve it. Most Caribbean island versions use browned sugar instead. On the Guyanese coast, without cassareep it is not pepperpot.

On the coast it is the Christmas breakfast, eaten with fresh homemade bread. True, but only half the story. In Indigenous Lokono (Arawak) homes in Moruca, pepperpot is close to an everyday breakfast, often made with the cassava water that cassareep is boiled from, and eaten with cassava bread, the flat Amerindian staple. And the Amerindian original was made with fish.

Cook-up rice, metemgee and bake

Guyana’s one-pot dishes come from African foodways and the hard realities of slavery. Cook-up rice is rice cooked down in fresh coconut milk with peas or beans, salted beef, pigtail, chicken or tripe, and plenty of thyme. Metemgee is thicker: ground provisions, meaning root vegetables such as cassava and sweet potato, with semi-ripe plantain, salt beef and duff dumplings, all braised in coconut milk. One scholar traces the name to Twi, a West African language, where it means roughly “and plantains make it good”.

Then there is bake, a fried bread, eaten with saltfish or simply with butter.

Curry, roti and dhal puri

Pepperpot gets the fame. Curry gets eaten. Thanks to Indian Guyanese, curry is even more common than pepperpot or metemgee on home and restaurant menus: chicken, goat, or a seafood curry of crab or gillbacker, a prized local fish. It comes with rice, roti or dhal puri, a flatbread filled with ground split peas. For a big village occasion, families cook seven curry: rice, dhal, a chutney and four or five vegetable dishes served on a lotus leaf.

Chinese, Portuguese and the rest of the table

Chinese food is the most popular food Guyanese buy rather than cook, and it has gone local: fried rice and chowmein with Caribbean seasoning. The Portuguese from Madeira gave Guyana garlic pork, cured in vinegar with garlic, thyme and wiri wiri pepper. Everywhere you go you will find tropical fruit and juice: soursop, sapodilla, tamarind, genip, jamoon and awara, an orange palm fruit that turns up again in French Guiana’s Easter pot.

Christmas and Old Year’s Night in Guyana

After the Christmas pepperpot come Portuguese garlic pork, roast pork, baked ham and black cake, its fruit soaked for weeks in rum or port wine, beside dhal puri, curried chicken with roti, chowmein and fried rice. To drink: sorrel steeped with ginger, mauby, made from tree bark, and homemade ginger beer. On 31 December, Old Year’s Night, custom puts cook-up rice in every Guyanese home. By one old custom the beans promise a year of plenty.

El Dorado Rum, Demerara Sugar and Guyana’s Other Drinks

Guyana produces excellent rum, and the reason is in the equipment. Demerara Distillers, the maker of El Dorado, still works the last two original wooden pot stills in the world, one from the Port Mourant estate, founded in 1732, and the last fully working wooden Coffey still. Demerara sugar takes its name from the Demerara River, which meets the Atlantic at Georgetown.

Distillery tours are possible, and our Three Guianas Adventure Tour includes an El Dorado tasting in Georgetown. Without alcohol, look for fresh passion fruit and golden apple juice.

Surinamese Food: Roti, Pom, Moksi Alesi and Bami

Suriname shares a coast with Guyana, not a kitchen. Its cooks are Hindustani, Javanese, Creole, Chinese, Indigenous and Jewish. Surinamese have a word for the result: moksi, a mixture.

Roti came with the Hindustani contract workers, the first of whom landed from the ship Lalla Rookh on 5 June 1873. Order roti kip, roti with chicken. Surinamese roti is not the roti of India or of Trinidad.

Pom is the festive dish: grated pomtajer, the root of the tayer plant, mixed with citrus juice and baked in layers around chicken until golden. The usual story credits Suriname’s Jewish community, who made it with potatoes, until the local root took over; some say it is Creole. Nobody argues this: there is no birthday without pom.

Moksi alesi is a rice dish, and moksi tells you what kind. A Guyanese chef visiting Paramaribo told the newspaper de Ware Tijd it is the same concept as cook-up rice, and yet very different. Eat both, then decide.

The Javanese arrived from 1890, and their bami (fried noodles) with saté is everyday Suriname, as is saoto soup, still made to the original recipe. Look also for pindasoep (peanut soup) and bara, a Hindustani snack. Parbo, brewed in Paramaribo since 1955, has been the most-drunk beer ever since.

French Guiana Food: Bouillon d’Awara, Colombo and Couac

French Guiana is part of France, a single territorial collectivity with the powers of an overseas department and region, inside the EU and on the euro. The dish to know is bouillon d’awara: the pulp of the orange awara palm fruit mixed with fish, smoked meat and other ingredients, a traditional dish often served at Easter.

Everyday Creole food is the fricassée, chicken or pork marinated in spices and browned, served with red beans, rice or couac, roasted cassava semolina. Colombo is the local curry, of chicken, pork or goat with vegetables, and blaff is fish marinated in lime, garlic and herbs, then poached. In Cacao, about an hour’s drive from Cayenne, Hmong families who came as refugees from Laos in the 1970s hold a Sunday market of fruit, vegetables and Hmong dishes such as pho and banana fritters. Finish with a sorbet, which here means a milk-based ice, in coconut or peanut.

Eating Safely in the Guianas

The CDC’s starting point is the same for all three: food and water standards vary by destination and within a country. The difference is typhoid. The CDC recommends the vaccine for most travelers to Guyana; for Suriname and French Guiana it suggests considering it for rural areas with poor sanitation, stays of a month or more, or visits to friends and relatives. Our Guianas health guide covers the rest.

Build Food Into Your Guianas Trip

Our 14-day Three Guianas itinerary takes in the rum tasting, lunch at a Javanese warung (a small eatery) in Commewijne and the Cacao market, then ends with a food day in Belém, Brazil, where the Amazon’s own cooking takes over. Wild Guyana starts day two with a guided walk through Bourda Market, Georgetown’s largest market, sampling as you go.

Menus switch between English, Dutch and French: our Guianas languages guide helps, and the money guide covers each country’s currency. Or ask us to design a custom Guianas trip that gives the table as much time as the rainforest.