Dibi in Dakar: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

Dibi is grilled meat, almost always lamb or mutton, cooked over charcoal, chopped into pieces and handed over on a sheet of paper with raw onion, mustard and hot pepper. It is not a dish anyone cooks at home. It belongs to a kind of place, the dibiterie: a counter, a grill and usually a carcass or a few hanging cuts, where you choose the meat, it is weighed, and it goes onto the coals while you wait.

It is not Dakar’s alone. Dibi is eaten across the country and grilled-meat counters of this kind run through much of West Africa, and the trade is widely associated with Hausa grillers from further east, whose name survives in one of the variants below. What Dakar has is the density: a large, late-eating city where a dibiterie on the corner is as ordinary as a bakery, and where dibi is the default answer to being hungry after dark.

It is also the opposite of the national dish in almost every way. Thiéboudienne is a lunch eaten slowly from a shared bowl; dibi is evening food, eaten with the fingers, often standing or on a bench, and over quickly. Knowing that saves a visitor from looking for it at noon.

Sheep matter in Senegalese life beyond the grill. At Tabaski, the Muslim feast of the sacrifice, households slaughter a ram, and the city is full of sheep in the weeks before. That is not the same thing as dibi, which is a commercial, everyday food, but it explains why lamb rather than beef or chicken is the meat this city reaches for when it grills.

What to order

Ordering is mostly pointing and quantity. The meat is sold by weight, and the person at the grill will expect you to say how much, or to indicate a cut and let them weigh it. A quarter or half kilo is a normal order for one or two people; asking for “a portion” without a weight usually works, but expect to be asked again.

What you choose between:

• Ribs or chops — the bony cuts, with fat attached. This is what most people mean by dibi, and the fat is the point: it renders and crisps over the charcoal. Asking for leaner meat is possible.
• Boneless pieces — cut from the leg or shoulder, easier to eat, a little drier.
• Liver, where the counter has it, grilled the same way.
• Dibi haoussa — a different preparation sold under the same word: meat, usually beef, goat or lamb, coated in a dry spiced powder that contains ground peanut and grilled over charcoal. It is the local name for the grilled spiced meat known across the Hausa world as suya, and it is hotter and drier than the plain lamb.

What arrives is the meat chopped on the board into bite-sized pieces, onion sliced over it, a smear of mustard and a pinch of seasoning salt, everything wrapped in paper. Bread, a length of baguette, is often available on the side and is the usual way to deal with the juices.

The words worth having are French first, because that is the language of the menu board if there is one: mouton (mutton or lamb), côtelettes (chops), avec oignons, moutarde. For heat, ask for piment, and expect it to be real. In Wolof, yàpp is meat, and xar is sheep; using them is not necessary but is noticed, kindly.

You eat it with your fingers, off the paper. There is no fork and no one expects one.

What to avoid

The quality question with dibi is almost entirely one of freshness of the grilling, and it is visible from the street.

A good dibiterie cuts and grills to order: you see raw meat at the counter, a charcoal bed that is actually glowing, and a short wait. Meat already cooked and stacked at the edge of the grill, waiting to be warmed through, is the sign to move on. Reheated lamb fat turns waxy and the pieces go gray and tight, which no amount of mustard rescues. The busiest hours are also the safest, for the plain reason that the meat turns over.

Know what you are getting on a restaurant menu. “Dibi” served as a plated main course with fries and a salad, at a sit-down price, is a fair meal but a different experience from the counter: it loses the thing that defines the dish, the smoke, the chopping board, the paper. The same goes for “brochettes” offered as its equivalent. Skewers of cubed meat are a perfectly good food, but they are not what this city means by dibi.

Look at the onions. They should be sliced to order and still sharp. A bowl of onions sitting in the heat for hours is a reliable indicator of how the rest of the counter is run.

Practicalities

Dibi is a night food, and the grills light late. Most dibiteries do little before the early evening, are busiest after dark and keep going well into the night. Trying to find a good one at lunchtime is mostly a waste of a walk; that is when the city is eating rice.

Because it is sold by weight, the price depends on what you point at, and the bony, fatty cuts are usually the cheaper ones per kilo. A shared order for two is one of the more substantial cheap meals in the city.

Agree the weight, or at least see the scale, before the meat goes onto the grill. It is normal to be told the price once it has been weighed, and this is the moment to ask, not after it has been chopped and wrapped.

These are cash businesses, and small notes matter more than usual: a counter at ten at night will not have change for a large one. Expect soft drinks and water to drink with it.

During the weeks around Tabaski the price of sheep rises sharply across the country, and grilled lamb tends to follow. It is a good time to see the city’s relationship with the animal and a less good one to expect the usual price.