Few travellers make it to Malabo, the sleepy seaside capital of Equatorial Guinea, and fewer still arrive with a dinner plan. A recent group touring the city on Bioko Island stumbled into one anyway — via a photo request from a Cameroonian woman married to a Swiss man, who turned out to run what they now rate as the best restaurant in town: La Luna.
Malabo itself is an odd place. Around 300,000 people live here, on the northern coast of Bioko Island facing Cameroon across the Gulf of Guinea, and the city is the country's commercial and oil-industry hub. Yet for all the oil money, grand Spanish colonial buildings and modern developments, the streets are oddly quiet. The nightlife is thin — the writers joke it's even thinner than Pyongyang's, a city Malabo is constantly (and unflatteringly) compared to. So a genuinely good restaurant matters more here than it would in most capitals.
La Luna sits on Calle Argelia, directly opposite the port, and it's an institution — around for years, though nobody could pin down an opening date. It's a proper set-up: ocean views, a swimming pool, a big outdoor terrace plus an indoor dining room with a well-stocked bar. On the night in question, the outdoor tables were full of Malabo's well-heeled crowd, and Equatoguineans do love a drink.
The menu blends Spanish, international and African cooking. Prices are reasonable for an oil-town showpiece: mixed salad at 4,000 CFA (about $6.80), sautéed prawns 5,000 CFA ($8.50), beef tenderloin 6,000 CFA ($10.20), grilled grouper 9,000 CFA ($15.30), garlic-fried prawns 11,000 CFA ($18.70), plus staples like spaghetti Bolognese and West African chicken yassa. Cocktails run 4,000–5,000 CFA and a beer is a mere 1,500 CFA ($2.55). The reviewers went off-menu-adjacent with garlic squid as a starter, then African-style escargot — giant local snails, far bigger than the French kind, and reportedly delicious. Drinks were Spanish San Miguel, fitting for a former Spanish colony.
Verdict: ambience, food and price combined, La Luna beat everything else they ate in the country. Contact details are listed as +240 333 096 096, or email — useful given how few dining options Malabo offers and how hard reliable recommendations are to come by there.
For the small number of travellers who make it to Equatorial Guinea — usually on organised tours, since independent travel is complicated — this is exactly the kind of practical find that matters. Malabo has very few restaurants a visitor can confidently walk into, so having a name, address and phone number for a waterfront place with a pool, a good bar and sub-$20 mains is gold. It also shows the upside of travelling with a group in a little-visited country: locals approach, conversations happen, and dinner sorts itself out.
