Nairobi the city was out of place. It seemed to be put upon the grassland. And sure enough as we drove in from the airport there was a giraffe in the grass a hundred metres from the road. In the distance were some skyscrapers in the misplaced smog. In town there were equally misplaced expatriate squash players and Hash House Harrier runners drinking beer and pink gins next to swimming-pools and behind a brick walls shielding them from the traffic, blackness and poverty without.
So Kenya is not a great big game park, but has a city with the office workers, traffic lights, shops, crowds and of restaurants.
And it is to a restaurant that I want to take you now.
I am now to break a self imposed taboo of some two and half decades and will attempt a restaurant review.
Several kilometres from the centre of Nairobi, down some dirt-tracks and back on to the bitumen and then down some streets where lighting had never been erected, is the well-lit and well-heeled Carnivore Restaurant. It serves bread and salad on sufferance as an afterthought. Meat is its forte. As you enter the restaurant you pass a pit of fire over which large joints of meat are rotating, dripping fizzles of blood on to the red hot coals beneath.
But this was no ordinary barbecue or spit roast. Sure, there was beef, lamb and pork. But to eat these would have been a waste of precious stomach space. For there were other things on the menu that tempted the palate of any traveller seeking a taste of the be exotic.
For among the burning flesh on steel skewers were examples of Africa’s best carnivorous delights. At the Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi one can taste zebra, several sorts of antelope, including impala and Thompson’s gazelle, wildebeest, crocodile and ostrich. All of it is farmed.
And unlike any other exotic meat one cannot describe it as “a bit like chicken”. No, this was tangy, gamey and very tasty.
For wine we had some ghastly Kenyan plonk followed by some marginally more drinkable South African red which added to the extraordinary assault on the taste buds.
The serving of the meat was a ritual in itself. Each table is issued with a small flag on a 30cm flagpole. While ever a table’s flag stayed up, the servings of meat continued. Waiters came round with chunks of meat on two one-metre-long skewers. They banged the point of the skewers on one’s plate and hacked off a couple of pieces of red and black meat, asking, “”Zebra, Sir” or “Wildebeest, sir”.
At the centre of the table was a lazy Susan full of various sauces and spices. The waiter advised, in fact instructed, us as to which sauce or spice went with which meat.
Maybe Tidbinbilla should follow suit. It could set up a restaurant with range of dishes like kangaroo, emu, koala, goanna and platypus — all farmed of course.
Anyway, next time you drop into Nairobi, don’t miss the Carnivore restaurant.