It's high time local foods found their rightful place on five-star hotel menus

In Kenya, we easily promoted boiled maize, ngwaci (sweet potatoes), and nduma (arrowroots) to five-star hotel menus.

What about roasted maize? What was ordinary man’s food has been mainstreamed into our cuisine. Big hotels can tell us how the visitors or tourists reacted to that. 

Some hotels in Mombasa integrated mahamri and maandazi into their menu. Visitors love that. I doubt if our visitors want to pay top dollars to come and eat what they have in their own homes. They want something exotic. Do we offer them that? 

Ask visitors to Ghana or West Africa in general what they enjoyed most. It’s their food! I love pitting Nigerians against Ghanaians by asking who has better cuisine. Guess the responses!  

West African foods include soups and exotics like snails. We can’t forget jollof rice and plantain.

Why do we think our visitors would not be interested in musenye, mukimo, kimanga, injera or muthokoi? Have we tried? Who said it’s only in West Africa where food is an attraction? 

On my last visit to a highly rated hotel in Tanzania, there was always madafu (coconut water) for breakfast, and nothing was ever left!

Mzungus sampled it with pride. When I asked Europeans if they could take palm wine, they kept asking for it till the trip was over.

Why are madafu sold on our streets and not in five-star hotels? Who would hate something so natural? Or I don’t frequent big hotels?

Tourism is about exotics, some mysteries and mystics. Egyptians sell pyramids (pharaohs‘ graves); Zanzibar sells Stone City, which is people’s homes!

We are so fixated on the Big Five, yet we have lots of other selling points. Does Mombasa have a stone city?  

Our foods are unique and impossible to copy; can we make money out of them?

If we can have Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian and other ethically based cuisines, why not local cuisines? Why has Masai’s famous cuisine – blood mixed with milk – not been marketed? You may be surprised. And no one forgets the taste of food.

What of our beers and associated ceremonies? Why do we think potatoes, bread, meat or beer with foreign names are better than ours? At least we can boast of our dawa [cocktail], which is now bottled. But we can do better than that!