Maltese food is not complicated, and that is the point. It comes from a place that has been farmed hard, fished every morning and occupied by enough different empires to leave traces in the kitchen — Arab, Sicilian, British, all of it stirred together over centuries. The result is a cuisine that is modest in presentation and serious in flavour. Knowing what to order, where to order it and roughly what to hand over keeps you on the right side of things.
This page covers the dishes worth your attention, what they should cost at a local place versus a tourist trap, and where residents of the islands actually eat. If you are budgeting the trip more broadly, our Malta trip costs guide has the fuller picture.
If there is one thing you eat in Malta, it is a pastizz. Flaky, laminated pastry — somewhere between rough puff and filo in texture — filled with either ricotta (tal-irkotta) or mushy peas (tal-piżelli). They come out of the oven in batches through the day, they are eaten standing up, and they cost almost nothing. A pastizz at a proper pastizzeria runs €0.35–€0.50. In a tourist-facing café in Valletta or Sliema you might pay €0.60–€1.20, which is still cheap but tells you something about the room you are standing in.
The ricotta version is the one most people reach for first. The pea version divides people — the filling is heavily spiced with pepper and, depending on the batch, can be quite dense. Both are best within ten minutes of leaving the oven. Cold pastizzi are a different, inferior product. Crystal Palace in Rabat is probably the most famous pastizzeria in Malta and is open until very late, which matters because the post-night-out pastizz is a Maltese institution. Is-Serkin in Valletta is a reliable town option. Neither place has a website and neither needs one.
The Maltese ftira is a sourdough bread ring, and it is the basis of what most people here would call a proper lunch. Eaten plain, it is pleasantly chewy with a thin crust. Used as a sandwich — split and loaded with tuna, capers, bigilla (a broad bean paste), tomatoes, olives and whatever else is going — it becomes the standard midday meal for people who are not sitting down in a restaurant. A filled ftira costs roughly €3.50–€5.50 depending on the fillings and whether you are buying from a village bakery or a smarter sandwich shop.
The ftira was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2020, which the Maltese are quietly pleased about. You will find it at bakeries (ħobż) across both Malta and Gozo. In Valletta, the area around Merchants Street has a few decent options. On Gozo, the ftira tends to be heavier and the bread slightly denser, which many people prefer. Ask for it with kunserva — a concentrated tomato paste that is rubbed directly onto the cut face of the bread — and you have the simplest version, and often the best.
Rabbit — fenek in Maltese — is the national dish, and fenkata refers both to the rabbit stew and to the broader tradition of eating rabbit with family or friends, usually in quantity. The rabbit is marinated in red wine, then slow-cooked with tomatoes, garlic and herbs. It is rich and sticky and best eaten in a village restaurant where it has been on the menu for decades. Rabbit is also served fried (il-fenek moqli), which is crispier and arguably more approachable if you are cautious about stews.
A rabbit main at a local restaurant will typically cost you €10–€20 as part of a casual lunch, though at a mid-range dinner restaurant you are more likely to pay €14–€22 for a rabbit dish. In the harbour restaurants aimed squarely at tourists, expect €30–€40 per head for dinner, excluding wine. The dish is worth eating at least once, but where you eat it matters almost as much as what you order. Mgarr, Dingli and the villages in the south of Malta tend to have restaurants where fenkata is taken seriously. VisitMalta has a running list of local food events where fenkata features.
Worth noting: rabbit in Malta is farmed rabbit, not wild. The flavour is milder than you might expect if your only experience of rabbit is a gamey wild version from elsewhere in Europe. This surprises some people, pleasantly or otherwise.
Maltese sweets tend to cluster around religious occasions. Imqaret are deep-fried pastry parcels filled with dates and spiced with anise and citrus; they are sold from stalls and vans, particularly around feast days, and cost almost nothing — usually under a euro each. Mqaret and figolli (almond-paste pastries shaped and iced for Easter) are the two most distinctively Maltese things in the sweet category. Kannoli, which most people associate with Sicily, are also everywhere here and are usually good; Malta and Sicily share enough culinary history that the presence of kannoli is not imitation but inheritance.
Kinnie deserves a specific mention because it is everywhere and genuinely unique. It is a bittersweet carbonated drink made from bitter oranges and aromatic herbs, produced in Malta since 1952. The flavour is difficult to describe — slightly medicinal to some people, refreshing to others, best appreciated cold and on a hot day. It costs roughly what a soft drink costs anywhere in Malta. You will either like it on first sip or find it peculiar, but you should try it at least once because it is not replicated anywhere else.
A coffee at a local bar runs €1.50–€2.50. The same coffee at a polished café in a tourist area will cost €3.00 or more. The local bar version is usually a short, strong espresso or a cappuccino and is perfectly decent. There is no reason to pay twice as much for the same caffeine in a more decorated room.
The short answer is: away from the water in the tourist towns, and in the villages. Restaurants on Valletta's waterfront, along the Sliema promenade, in St Julian's and around the Spinola Bay area are trading on location. The food is not always bad, but the prices consistently reflect the view rather than what is on the plate. Dinner mains in those areas regularly run €30–€40 per person before wine; a bottle of wine at a mid-range restaurant is €15–€25.
The places locals go are harder to find on a search engine but not hard to find in person. Look for restaurants in Rabat, Naxxar, Siggiewi, Birgu (Vittoriosa) and the villages of the south. A sit-down lunch main at a genuinely local restaurant is €10–€20 including a basic soft drink. The menu will often be written on a board or spoken aloud. The tablecloths may be paper. The bread will be brought without being asked.
For Gozo, the same principle applies but is even more pronounced — the interior of Gozo has restaurants that have been feeding the same families for thirty years, and the pricing is correspondingly different from the seafront places in Mgarr or Xlendi. Getting there from Malta: take route 41 from Valletta to Ċirkewwa, then the Gozo Channel ferry — a return foot-passenger ticket is approximately €4.65. Check current schedules at Gozo Channel. Bus fares on Malta are currently at the summer rate of €2.50 per single journey (summer season runs until 18 October).
For Marsaxlokk, which has the best fish market on the island and decent restaurants alongside it, take route 81 from Valletta (runs daily) or route 85. Sunday morning is when the market is at its fullest and the restaurants are busiest — go early if you want a table without waiting.
If you are eating in Valletta itself, move off Republic Street. The streets parallel to it — particularly around the lower end of the city near the waterfront lift — have smaller restaurants where the lunch trade is mostly office workers and civil servants, which tends to keep prices honest. The Valletta guide covers the city in more detail. You can also check what Heritage Malta has on around the island as cultural events sometimes coincide with food festivals worth seeking out.
The harbour-view restaurants in tourist areas. This applies specifically to the strip around St Julian's, the Sliema seafront and the more obvious parts of Valletta near the tourist buses. The food is calibrated for people who will not come back, which shows in both the kitchen and the bill. A dinner that costs €30–€40 per head in one of these places will cost half as much and taste better three streets back or in a village thirty minutes away by bus.
Maltese food in hotel restaurants. With a handful of exceptions, hotel restaurants in Malta serve an international approximation of local food that has been smoothed out for the broadest possible audience. If you want rabbit stew that actually tastes of rabbit stew, go to a place that specialises in it.
Pastizzi from airport cafés or hotel minibars. These exist. They are not worth it. The real thing costs less than fifty cents and is five minutes' walk from almost anywhere on the island.
Fish and chips. Malta has excellent fresh fish. It also has a large number of British-style fish-and-chip shops that are neither British nor Maltese and not particularly good at either. The fresh catch at Marsaxlokk on a Sunday morning, cooked at one of the adjacent restaurants at lunchtime, is an entirely different proposition and one of the better meals you will have here.
Expensive cocktails on a rooftop bar as a way of experiencing Malta at night. This is not a food point exactly, but it costs money that would be better spent on a proper dinner. A pint of Cisk — Malta's own lager, perfectly drinkable — costs €2.50–€5.00 in bars, with the lower end reserved for places that are not selling you a sunset alongside it.
A flaky pastry parcel filled with ricotta or spiced peas, baked fresh through the day. At a local pastizzeria expect €0.35–€0.50; tourist cafés may charge €0.60–€0.75.
It is genuinely eaten by Maltese families and has been for centuries. Village restaurants take it seriously; tourist-strip restaurants often do not.
Village restaurants in Rabat, Siggiewi, Birgu and the rural south, or Marsaxlokk on a Sunday. Avoid waterfront restaurants in St Julian's and Sliema.
A Maltese soft drink made from bitter oranges and herbs, produced since 1952. It is slightly bitter and quite distinctive — worth trying once.
Routes 81 (daily) and 85 both run from Valletta. The summer single fare is €2.50.
It depends entirely on where you eat. A local lunch main is €10–€20; a tourist harbour dinner can reach €30–€40 per head before wine. The gap is large enough to matter over a week.