Here's What You Might Eat For Breakfast In The Maldives

Let's be honest, the best part about traveling is immersing yourself in the local cuisine. The experience is tasty, fascinating, and gratifying; reading up on another country's eats while you're planning a trip is almost as much fun. Many of us consider breakfast the most important meal of the day, and that applies when traveling as you need extra fuel for sightseeing or simply lounging for hours on the beach. So, it's both helpful and intriguing to learn what a typical breakfast is in Germany, what's included in a traditional Thai breakfast, or what might make up a morning meal in Sweden. With visions of palm trees and turquoise waters dancing in our heads, we're now setting our sights on breakfast in the Maldives.

One of the most common breakfast dishes in the Maldives is mas huni. It's shredded tuna — canned or fresh — mixed with red onions, chiles, and grated fresh coconut. This is eaten with thin roshi or chapati, one of many different types of flatbread – if you find roshi with coconut in the dough, that's huni roshi. Flatbreads and tuna form a baseline for other options, including variations on mas huni with ingredients like pumpkin. There's also masroshi, which is when the roshi is stuffed with tuna and coconut; kulhi mas, tuna cubes in a spicy onion and coconut paste with spices; and kulhi riha, a spicy side dish often made with smoked tuna, called valhomas.

Breakfast is a meal demanding attention and care in the Maldives, whether it's in the form of what's called a "long eat" or "short eat." A long eat is really just that, more of a sit-down meal in a restaurant. This is likely where you'd find mas huni and kulhi riha alongside roshi. A short eat more commonly takes place in a tea or coffee shop. You'll still find seafood dishes, but everything on offer is of a snackier variety — you can sample more things in a less formal setting. You might encounter saagu bondibai, or sago pudding; sago is a starch from palm trees, and here it's mixed with coconut milk, condensed milk, cardamom, and rose. There can also be pastries both savory and sweet, like bajiya, kulhi boakibaa, keemia, or samosas, all deep-fried with fillings like fish, vegetables, or chicken; or bondi, a coconut cake. Boshi mashuni, fruit salad with coconut milk, offers a lighter option. 

One alternative to both the long and short eats is the "floating breakfast," in which dishes are served on a tray in the pool — more for tourists, but a unique experience nonetheless. For accompanying beverages, no matter the setting, expect familiar favorites like coffee or black tea, or sai, a sweetened, milky tea. Tea's blend of sweetness and bitterness and overall herbal complexity will work wonders with the similarly sweet, acidic, spicy, and earthy flavors of many Maldivian breakfast choices.