From 18th of October this year (2022), we spent 3 weeks travelling around Madagascar (we'll upload more information on our route soon). We were lucky enough to explore the diversity of this beautiful country, and tried our best to see as much as possible that it had to offer, and that included trying as much food as we could. With one vegan and one omnivore, eating out in other countries can sometimes be a bit of a struggle for us or, at the very least, an experiment in communication!
The National language of Madagascar is Malagasy, but most business owners/waiters will have a pretty good grasp of French, which made things astronomically easier for us, as I speak French. Before we arrived we were told by our guide that vegan options were abundant (without being given much further detail). Though this is not technically untrue, the real challenge lies in 1) finding said options in some places and 2) getting any kind of variety in your diet as a vegan. I didn't find any other really thorough guides online, so I wanted to share our experience. The guides available seemed to focus on vegetarian food only. Speaking of which...
Vegetarians
Worth noting is that as a vegetarian, you would honestly not even remotely struggle in Madagascar. French influence from former colonisation is rife, and it is most notable in Malagasy cuisine, meaning that there are endless options with cheese, eggs, butter, pastry, cream etc. Pizza is also absolutely everywhere as this seems to be a component of Western cuisine that Madagascar has well and truly latched onto. We also saw plenty of gratins, ramen style soups with eggs, cake shops and patisseries etc. This wasn't even just in 'Western-style' restaurants (as is often the case in most of Africa), but quite literally everywhere. So you really will have no shortage of options. Additionally for meat eaters and pescatarians, the options are pretty plentiful. Murray didn't get bored in 3 weeks with a lot of different meats to choose from, as well as fish and veggie options.
Vegans
Here is where it gets tricky, but there are definitely options and you can try to mix things up. Suggestions are based on what we ate and liked, but there are other options too. One thing that is really important to note is that the roads in Madagascar are truly terrible, so transporting goods is quite tricky for the local people. As a large country, Madagascar does have different climates, and therefore growing seasons, in different areas, and you can't always get the exact food you want if it is not in season and grown locally, and you might have to be a little flexible. We predominantly visited the middle section of the country (both East and West - again, route to follow soon) and I have tried to be clear where we found each dish to give you a good idea.
BREAKFAST
To start off with (before we had wised up a bit!), we were eating the breakfasts offered by our hotels. Our hotels were 2-3* and breakfasts were not usually complimentary, and we realised pretty quickly that it was completely not worth paying the extra money for them (hotel breakfasts were usually around 20-25000 Ariary/£4-5 at the time of writing). Great for vegetarians but pretty terrible for vegans, they consisted of the following format:
Bread
Jam or honey
Butter
Cakes or pastry, sometimes banana bread or mofo gasy (see below)
Juice
Fruit
Coffee (served with condensed milk)
Optional eggs which usually cost a bit more
The addition of eggs made it an 'American Breakfast', otherwise everything else constituted the Malagasy version of a 'Continental Breakfast'. The food was really plentiful so it would technically have been good value, but for the fact that I couldn't really eat much of it.We didn't see anything else offered really except sometimes crêpes in French-owned hotels. Given that we could normally get a whole basket of fruit for about 500 Ariary (around 10p), we quickly realized we were really overpaying and started sorting ourselves out in the mornings instead of relying on the hotel. Below were our real breakfast staples:
Fruit from local markets - in the West of Madagascar at the time we were visiting it was mango season (great for me!) and mangoes were available all the way from just outside Tana (Antananarivo) to the west coast. Bananas were also in abundance everywhere and sometimes papaya or pineapple. There were also lots of avocados and tomatoes if you fancied something more savoury. On average we were able to get around a kilo of mangoes for 500 ariary (10p ish) and other fruits were a similar cost. When we entered the East it was almost impossible to get mangoes anywhere, and the vendors were replaced with huge markets of soursops, cacao fruit and giant custard apples. We also didn't see as many avocados (not to say they didn't exist!) and things were a bit more expensive, with each fruit costing around 1-2000 ariary (20-30p). It was still super cheap of course, so we did take advantage of the markets where we could.
Bread and local bakeries. While the bread served in hotels was generally abysmal quality, the bread we found in local bakers was normally super fresh and fluffy, and Murray was able to get some nice pastries and better coffee (though on the whole we did find the coffee in Madagascar pretty terrible - often much too bitter to drink black).
Street vendors - here was where we really hit the jackpot on variety, though it did take some explanation to understand what we were eating. As with most of Madagascar, the offerings varied from region to region and we often would find a dish we loved and then never be able to find it again elsewhere. Some examples of food we had for breakfast:
Pasta! This was weirdly ubiquitous at breakfast time, almost exclusively served cold with some kind of condiment and frequently with soup too. We avoided the soup as it wasn't clear what went into it, but the side dishes were normally a vegetable achard (pickle) and we had a very interesting one with papaya. The seasoning tended to be fairly oniony/garlicky, which could be a bit intense in the mornings! In the West, pasta was fairly specifically sold with shrimp beignet (a kind of doughnut) from the coast, but it wasn't considered unusual that I ate it without.
Mofo Gasy - I previously knew this as vitumbua, which is an accidentally vegan, East African doughnut, made with rice flour and coconut milk, usually spiced with cardamom. Mofo Gasy are a bit less flavourful but a great reliable vegan treat if needed. N.B. they do not really last more than one day without becoming extremely dry and unpleasant, so they aren't a great one for bulk buying. Stalls selling mofo gasy generally had a few options, normally some other doughnuts or crêpes for Murray too.
Vary Anana - nothing to do with pineapple, despite what the name might suggest, this is a very traditional local fare. We were able to get it in hotels, but only if we pre-ordered the night before, but mostly we found it in local restaurants. In its basic form, it is a rice soup, porridge-like in flavour and consistency (but savoury) traditionally eaten with meat or eggs. We were able to order with green vegetable though, fair warning, they really do not give you much of the vegetable with it. It was quite customisable so you could add to it (though you would have to buy your own accompaniments, as it would be quite weird from a local perspective to ask for other veg or seasonings). Most places served this in absolutely ginormous portions - it made for an extremely hearty (perhaps too hearty!) breakfast!
You can buy soy or almond milk/yoghurt or vegan butter/margarine in most larger supermarkets as well, but there are some more remote parts of the country without these types of stores, so it's best to stock up en route if you'll be off the grid for a few days.
LUNCH AND DINNER
Restaurants in Madagascar don't really differentiate too much between their lunch and dinner offerings, but again, food does vary by region. Food we generally found easy to come by:
Rice and legumes sautées - basically rice and veg. Thankfully this is ubiquitous though, advance warning: it is cooked differently everywhere you go and it is not always that great. One thing you can guarantee is that you will not be short on rice as they always give you a mountain of it, but we did find a few places that were very confused by the notion of vegetables as a main course and they'd bring you a very small amount. Since it is not often cooked in sauce, this can make for quite a dry dish with all the rice too. One definite tip for vegans is to ask for the vegetables to be sautéed in oil, not butter, as they will almost certainly use butter otherwise. We also took to carrying soy sauce with us for just such a disaster.
Pizza. Though this was a little harder to come by outside of the towns (on motorway stops for example), we had absolutely no trouble finding pizza in any towns/cities, even the smaller ones. Of course vegan cheese is not available but we found that the pizza was always made on site, so it was extremely easy for them to make it cheese-free, and vegetarian pizza is a common concept, so there was always plenty of vegetables. You could also buy some vegan cheese, if you can find it, and ask them to make it with that. They don't give you a discount for having the pizza without cheese, so that is up to you.
Noodles/min sao - there is a fair amount of Asian influence in Madagascar, so most places we were able to find noodles. We did also find that the portions were very light on vegetables (even if ordered as vegetable noodles) so unless you are happy with a very carb heavy meal, it's advisable to order a side of vegetables to go with it. The noodles are almost exclusively rice noodles and often made on site.
Asian/'Chinese' style soup - whenever you see soup on a menu in Madagascar, it generally refers to their so-called Chinese style soup (a Western style soup as we know it is normally listed as a 'potage'), which is a light broth, served with vegetables, eggs and often meat or fish. Vegans can order with just vegetables but again, if you're hungry then an extra portion of vegetables is a smart move as you don't get much in the way of vegetables. We mostly found this available in the east (loads in Antsirabe) but it is Available elsewhere too.
Pasta - again, available in certain places (predominantly the east) and often served with a tomato-based vegetable sauce. I would advise checking that there is no egg, as we had a few occasions where 'vegetable pasta' came out with a scrambled egg on top, which was genuinely bizarre.
Beans - very much not as widely available as I had expected, certainly nothing like other countries in Africa that I had previously visited. We were able to get them in 2, maybe 3 places. They were always really nice and usually filling with decent portion sizes.
Bread, rice etc and vegetables were widely available in shops, as were things like peanut butter, oil, soy sauce. One thing I found quite tricky after a while is that there is very little variation in the vegetables on offer, so a lot of your meals do end up being the same even if you're varying the format. For example, when we were there, courgettes (zucchini), carrots and green (long) beans were in season so I had these with every sing!e meal (including on pizzas and in pasta sauces). For that reason I would definitely recommend taking a vitamin supplement with you and trying to get meals with protein (beans or cooking at home) whenever you can. My opinions are completely my own here and I in no way consider myself an expert, so chat to a doctor if you are in any way unsure.
SNACKS
Crisps/nuts/dark chocolate/bread/crackers widely available in petrol stations and supermarkets
Chips widely available in restaurants
Achard is pickled vegetable (normally raw) and it is often served as a side or starter, which you can get with bread or crackers
Mofo Gasy (see above) and fruit were a favourite of mine
You can get coffee everywhere and local/herbal teas. When they offer coffee with milk, it is almost always sweetened condensed milk and we found only the very fancy hotels restaurants serving plant milk. Even then it was an unusual find. I normally buy soy or almond milk in supermarkets and take it with me if I want a coffee.
Fun fact: Madagascar does not have a license to see coca cola products, so they have their own brand called World Cola. There is no diet (low calorie) alternative either but they do have some fun soda flavors, such as grenadine (tastes a bit like irn bru) and bonbon Anglais (which we think was bubblegum)
DESSERTS
One highlight of Madagascar for Vegans is the dessert options!
Flambé: you can get a lot of fruits flambéd throughout the country, including banana and pineapple. Usually the fruit is marinated in rum and sometimes sugar, then set on fire to caramalise
Sorbet: hooray for the accidentally vegan foods! There is usually a sorbet option wherever you find ice cream
Mofo gasy - again! But seriously, they're so good!
So I hope this was helpful guys - again I'm sure there is more you can try. We did find that the more expensive restaurants had quite a lot of options that weren't offered elsewhere so it also depends on your budget.
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