Victoria Station Market: Street Food in the New Port Louis Terminal
Victoria Station in Port Louis spent more than half a century as a station without trains. The island's first train pulled out of here in 1864, and the station was the most important on the island, with the railway headquarters under the same roof. Then, in the middle of the last century, the island scrapped passenger trains and the tracks disappeared. They came back only in 2019 with the Metro Express, and three years later a building went up around them, adding shops and a market to the station.
The Victoria Station Market is a market hall inside the Victoria Urban Terminal, a modern transport hub in the center of Port Louis, where buses to the south and west of the island, a Metro Express stop, a supermarket and stalls with fruit and the street food of Mauritian cuisine all meet under one roof.
A Thousand Stalls for the Sidewalk Vendors
The terminal had its grand opening in July 2022 and the figures to match are big: 50,000 square meters, roughly two billion rupees, 67 shops and restaurants. The most interesting number, though, is a thousand - that is how many stalls the market hall reportedly got for the street vendors the municipality had spent years chasing off the downtown sidewalks. The deal was simple: off the street and under a roof, everyone with a stall of their own. During construction they sold from a temporary spot on Decaen Square a little further along, and the papers ran interviews with people who had no idea where they would end up. After the opening it turned out that a roof doesn't automatically mean customers: around eight hundred stalls were reportedly taken, and some of the vendors handed them back within a few months. At the time, the daily Le Mauricien printed a line from one of them in Creole: "Mo'nn vann zis enn savat" - I sold just one flip-flop. The food stalls were doing better than the flip-flops when I came by - people are more reliably hungry before a trip than in need of new shoes.
Victoria, Gare du Nord and the Market Map of Port Louis
The terminal inherited its name from the old station, which most likely got it from the queen under British rule, just like the cast-iron gates of the central market a few streets away. Port Louis therefore has two markets with Victoria in the name, one from 1839 and one barely settled in, and on top of that two bus stations that have split the island between them: Victoria sends buses to the south and west, to Curepipe, Quatre Bornes, the beaches around Flic en Flac and the airport; the north and east are served from Immigration Square, which locals call Gare du Nord and where people still sell straight off the sidewalk. So if you are heading for the sea in the north, do not look for your bus here. The Metro Express runs from Victoria through Rose Hill to Quatre Bornes and on to Curepipe; when I was there, it had been running to Curepipe for all of two months. And Victoria is not a one-off idea: the government is planning similar terminals with shops and a market for Rose Hill, Curepipe and Quatre Bornes as well, while the one at Gare du Nord is held up for now by its proximity to a UNESCO site.
What People Eat at the Station
The market hall is smaller than the number one thousand would suggest, and split between two kinds of business. One is the fruit and vegetable stalls, piled in December with crates of lychees, the other the serving windows with food you take in your hand and onto the bus. Station food here is the same food as in the city: dholl puri filled with curry and pickled vegetables, plain roti and fried gâteaux piments, the kind sold on every corner of the island. In the middle of the hall, in among the permanent counters, you also find vendors with a single bowl or a single tray holding nothing but what they fried at home that morning; once it's gone, they go home. Back home, food for the road means a schnitzel in foil that you wrap up in your own kitchen - here it gets wrapped at the station, in paper, a few steps from the platform. On the ground floor there is a big Winners supermarket to go with it, a flagship store for the chain, where you can pick up food souvenirs to take home before your flight.
A Paper Bag for the Ride to Flic en Flac
I came to the Victoria Station Market (see Where to Eat in Port Louis) for onward connections into the interior and left with a paper bag. Inside was a vegetarian roti, a flatbread filled with a curried vegetable mix, and with it, from one of those vendors with a single tray, a few gâteaux piments and other small bites. The roti was soft and still warm, the filling more hearty than hot, the fritters had a nice crunch. Victoria Station went half a century without trains, but the one thing a station is really for, it managed the whole time: sending you on your way with something to eat. The terminal cost two billion rupees. My share of it came to 15 MUR (0.30 EUR).
Victoria Urban Terminal
