We sat down over a copy of yummy magazine at the office with a plan to come up with 5 top restaurants we’d like to visit for the Nairobi Restaurant Week. 5 or less is the most that people felt their wallets and waistlines could accommodate.
To pick just 5 out of the 60 participating restaurants, we’ve had to be everything from choosy, fickle, petty to downright silly. Some choices we’ve made mostly based on the names and pictures of the restaurants on the magazine. Here is how the first lot was kicked out of the race.
- Restaurants we frequent in our line of work anyway.
- A menu with the words beef stroganoff.
- Restaurants with every day foods as the selling point. Like a picture of fries and a hotdog. This is hardly a culinary experience!
- Restaurants with pizza because apparently for pizza, it is either mediterraneo or nothing
- Restaurants with a picture of croissants as the selling point. Come on. This looks so ‘around the corner’ pastry.
- One fancy restaurant had mashed potato that looked like that poop emoji. In shape not in colour.
- A restaurant with a twig of rosemary as garnish because someone here does not like rosemary.
- A restaurant that is rumoured to have some hint of skin colour bias.
- Vegetarian restaurants because people have this thing about meat. Plus some of us ruminate on rabbit food anyway and Nairobi Restaurant Week is a welcome treat.
- Extra fancy restaurants that serve a child’s serving of food to adults. We know you.
- Restaurants whose meals look like something one could cobble up at home if I they were in a good mood and had a few hours to kill.
- Restaurants whose food looks like something one could cobble up without even trying too much.
- Restaurants with décor and not food on their profiles. Because as someone put it, we’re not going for the building.
Anyway, it boiled down to proximity and pricing. A restaurant on Thika Road may look attractive but it was just not practical to cross over from the other side of town for example.
There are so many restaurants taking part in Nairobi Restaurant week and if you’re having trouble picking one, here are a few things you can do to ease the process:
- Visit the Eat Out Kenya site and study the participating restaurants.
- Look for, and study menus of the participating restaurants and determine whether that is the culinary experience for you.
- Pricing – Depending on your pocket, there are options for as low as Kshs.1,000/-
- Get online and read reviews from other people who participated in the past NRW.
- Based on how you know the restaurants, say from past experiences, determine whether their menus and food experiences are worth the price.
All this is of course beside proximity to you.
Nairobi Restaurant Week is part sponsored by Wrigley East Africa, manufacturers and marketers of chewing gum. “Our oral care brand falls right at the heart of the Nairobi Restaurant Week. We are glad to be part of it and hope that our partnership with EatOut will go a long way in enlightening participants about oral care practices on-the-go,” said Wrigley East Africa Corporate Affairs Head Wanja Mwangi.
Happy eating!