Mo-Zam-Bik is a small chain of restaurants bringing the laidback vibe and tasty food of Mozambique to South Africa. It started up in Durban in 2005 and has since expanded to six locations in Durban, Johannesburg, and Pretoria.
The menu features all the usual Mozambican/Portuguese favorites. Seafood, namely fish, calamari, and grilled prawns, is the biggest highlight. The restaurant also does Mozambican steaks, marinated peri peri chicken, and traditional Portuguese fare such as espetada, trinchado, and prego rolls. One nice touch of the restaurant is that they give you a brown paper cone full of roasted peanuts to enjoy as you peruse the menu.
For starters, I tried the prawn rissoles, deep-fried prawn filled pastries. They were great and better than any I’ve had in Mozambique. For the main, I tried the prawn and calamari combo with grilled vegetables in their Zambeziana sauce, a mix of coconut milk, chili, and lime. The prawns were great and were a nice size. The calamari was a little on the chewy side but still tasty. The Zambeziana sauce is one of my favorites, but the more traditional peri peri sauce is also very delicious.
The restaurant is very nicely decorated with an authentic feel of a casual Mozambican restaurant on the beach. It’s colorful and vibrant with a true African feel and the whole vibe is very pleasant. That said, the atmosphere isn’t great due to the location. While there is a nice outdoor seating deck, it overlooks a parking lot, super busy Beyers Naude Drive, and the office parks beyond—it’s no Mozambican beach paradise. During my visit, they were also having problems with the sound system where the music would cut out for a few beats every ten seconds or so—very annoying and it would have been better to turn off the music all together. Service was a bit lacking, but I think our waitress was brand new. Still, we had to grab our own plates and sauce off a neighboring table after our starters arrived without the necessary accoutrements.