Shanta's Restaurant, Georgetown
Tucked into a converted wooden house on Church Street, Shanta's has been serving Guyanese-Indian cooking to an almost entirely local crowd for decades — the kind of place where the pepper pot is made to a recipe the owner won't write down and the roti arrives puffed and blistered straight from the tawa. If you eat only one sit-down meal in Georgetown, eat it here.
What to Order
Start with a bowl of pepperpot — the national dish, a dark, glossy stew of beef or pork slow-cooked with cassareep (a bitter cassava extract), cinnamon and wiri wiri peppers. It's simultaneously sweet, smoky and fiery, and the version here is among the most balanced in the city.
Follow it with dhal puri roti stuffed with curried channa (chickpeas) and a side of bhaji (sautéed spinach). The cook-up rice — a one-pot of rice, black-eye peas, coconut milk and whatever protein is available — is Friday's special and worth timing your visit around.
The Guyanese Food Story
Guyanese cuisine is a genuine creole synthesis: Amerindian cassava techniques, African one-pot traditions, Indian spice knowledge brought by indentured labourers after 1838, and Chinese five-spice in the chow mein that appears on every menu alongside the curry. Shanta's captures all of it without trying to be a tourist attraction.
Wash everything down with a glass of mauby — a bittersweet drink brewed from the bark of the mauby tree, chilled and sweetened — or a Banks Beer, Guyana's crisp national lager brewed in Georgetown since 1956.
Shanta's Restaurant, Georgetown on video
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