Sierra Leonean food is rice-centered — if you haven't had rice, you haven't eaten. Every main meal is built around it, and locals will often say a meal without rice doesn't count.
The national dish is cassava leaves: finely chopped cassava leaves cooked slowly with palm oil, groundnuts, and meat or fish. It's rich and earthy. Plasas is similar — leafy green stews made with potato leaves, spinach, or krain-krain (jute leaves), cooked in palm oil with groundnuts and protein. Groundnut stew (peanut soup) is another staple, usually made with chicken. Sierra Leone's jollof rice is good, cooked with tomatoes, onions, and local spices; it appears at every celebration.
Fufu — pounded cassava, plantain, or yam rolled into a soft ball used to scoop up stew — is common, particularly up-country. Street food includes akara (fried bean cakes), fried plantains, and puff-puff (fried sweet dough). Roast fish marinated with lime and ginger, sold by the roadside, is excellent.
In Freetown, you'll find Lebanese restaurants (a legacy of a long-established Lebanese community) alongside local chop houses and some more internationally oriented places in Aberdeen and Lumley. Outside the capital, options narrow quickly. Up-country, you'll mostly eat whatever the local chop house has that day — usually rice with some kind of stew, which is often perfectly good.
Drink Club beer (the local lager) and Palm wine if you're offered it.