On January 27th, a few days before my dad arrived for his two week visit, I made my first journey of any distance outside Arusha by spending a night in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.
My only real purpose for visiting Kenya was to renew my Tanzanian visa. To explain, I was issued a one year, multiple entry tourist visa through the Tanzanian embassy in the U.S. before arriving. However, the visa came with one rather annoying condition, which was that while I’m free to enter and exit the country as many times as I wish for the one year period, I’m never allowed to stay for a duration greater than 90 days at any one time. While I haven’t bothered to find the exact reasoning for this requirement, assuming that reason exists (which isn’t a safe assumption), I would venture a guess that it’s to keep people from “living” in Tanzania on a tourist visa by simply renewing the visa once each year. That makes sense in theory, but a popular way to circumvent this requirement, which I used, was to simply travel out of the country for one night, and then re-enter the country the following day, making me legal for another 90 days – and in my case, for the duration of my trip.
To be honest, I had no real interest in traveling to Nairobi. It has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Africa – as evidenced by its nickname, ‘Nairobbery’ – and many of the tourist attractions there are more expensive, which still would have been fine except I didn’t plan for any of them in my original travel budget. However, one attraction that was too tempting to pass up, regardless of cost, was an all you can eat “nyama choma” (steakhouse) named Carnivore. As someone who self proclaims he could eat steak every night for the rest of his life and never tire of it, I welcomed the thought of an all you can eat smorgasbord of grilled animal carcass induced euphoria. Making the restaurant even more appealing was the fact that I have been on a severe meat deficiency for most of my time in Tanzania. The hostel serves almost an entirely vegetarian menu, only occasionally interrupting its various takes on bread and vegetable medleys to serve fish or hamburgers. And while I’ve made an effort to find lunch venues that serve meat, the beef in general that I’ve found in Tanzania is of less than ideal quality. Combine these facts, and you can understand why I was so keen to visit a place whose name literally means ‘meat-eater’.
With only one objective in mind upon arriving to Nairobi, my trip was pretty simple and straightforward. I hopped on the 2:00 pm bus leaving from Arusha, traveled the seven and a half hour journey to Nairobi, got dropped off at the hotel, threw my bags in my room, and caught a taxi to take me straight to Carnivore. Being 10:00pm at the time of my arrival, I had plenty of time to enjoy dinner and make it back to the hotel to get some sleep before catching my 7:30 am bus back to Arusha.
Before I describe the dining experience, let me give a short background of the restaurant. Twice it has been voted among the 50 best restaurants of the world, although to be fair, this was before they had to stop serving some of their more exotic meats such as zebra, hardebeest, and camel (some lame reason about conserving the African wildlife or something…whatever). Nonetheless, it is still one of the most popular dinner destinations for tourists, and I had high expectations.
When I walked in, I was immediately confronted by a large circular barbeque pit room with see-through wire caging for walls. On the inside of the room were huge grills operating at full force, and on the cage walls themselves hung huge portions of cooked meat waiting to be served to customers. Not a bad first impression. Being transfixed by the barbeque pit, it wasn’t until I was finally on my way to be seated that I fully took in the size of this place. Not only could the restaurant itself easily seat about 300-400 people, but it was also connected to one of the biggest nightclubs I’ve ever been in (which sadly, I was only able to take a quick lap around after dinner before departing back to the hotel).
After being seated, my waiter for the evening came by to explain how things worked: there was a set menu, he would bring out soup first, then salad, and then when I was ready I could put up a flag to signal the other servers to start bringing me meat. Then, when I could eat no more, I would take down the flag; kind of like raising a white flag in surrender, only the exact opposite.
While waiting for my soup, I had the time to survey my surroundings a little further. As I mentioned, the waiter said that once I raised the flag, servers would start coming over to offer me various cuts of meat. Well, it turns out these servers are all over the place, and are easily identified by the fact that they are decked out in zebra-patterned aprons and a hat that looked like a cross between that of a Venetian gondolier and something Greg Norman would wear while he was choking away a Masters’ Championship to Nick Faldo. Most importantly, they were all carrying swords and spears of meat, most of which had to be two and a half feet long. I couldn’t wait.
So while I was admiring the biggest shish kabobs I had ever seen, my soup finally came out. At this point I was starving from spending the last 10 minutes staring at meat, so I think I inhaled the soup in about 90 seconds flat. Turned out it was some sort of broth based from animal meat. Imagine that. Needless to say, I was happy about how things were starting.
Next came the salad. Actually, I should say that next came five different salads on one of those rotating food serves. This wasn’t so I could pick my favorite, mind you; every salad was for me. To be honest, the salads all looked great and I’m sure I would have enjoyed them, but I was at an all you can eat steakhouse. Further, I had been on a healthy overdose of vegetables for the past three months, so there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of sense in wasting any space on lettuce leaves. Therefore, I did the only sensible thing and proceeded to ignore the salads entirely. And with that, it was time to put up the flag.
Within about three minutes server number one came over. “May I offer you some crocodile, sir?” Yes sir, yes you may. After taking my first bite, I immediately had flashbacks to one of my childhood (teenhood, I guess, to be more precise) trips to Florida where I tried alligator. At the time, I didn’t care for it much. But hey, this was crocodile; it could be different. Then again, maybe not. It still sucked. Similar to alligator, it’s just a little too chewy, and I’m not sure how to better describe the taste than by saying that even when it’s cooked properly, you’re left wondering if maybe it didn’t go a little bit bad before making it onto the grill.
The rest of the meal, however, was superb. Over the course of the next hour I demolished my way through multiple portions of sausages, two different cuts of beef, chicken, pork, three different cuts of lamb, and some surprisingly good ostrich meatballs. After thinking I couldn’t take one more bite, I reached for the flag. Time to surrender, or so I thought.
Just as I was reaching out, the guy serving the baby lamb chops – which were crazy good and the unexpected winner for my favorite cut of the night – came over. “Would you like another lambchop, sir?” Twist my arm; sure I’ll have another. But then he followed up with, “Actually sir, I only have three left in this batch. Would you just like to finish them off?” Ugh… Trust me, at this point I really wanted to say no. But considering how much I had ranted over the past weeks and months to anyone and everyone about how much I was craving meat since arriving, it just seemed like it would be a slap in the face to all of those who had to suffer through listening to me if I would have said no. So, silently thanking myself for having the sense to ignore the five salads, I went to work. Granted, they were baby lamb chops, but still, if you’ve ever been to that point where you absolutely don’t want to take another bite, then you can understand what a Herculean task chowing through three baby lambchops could be. Nonetheless, I endured through it and finished them off. By the end of the meal, over half my plate was full of only bones, gristle, and fat.
Overall, I’d have to say the meal was pretty solid, although not ‘top 50 restaurant in the world’ solid. Nonetheless, for someone craving meat since he arrived three months earlier, it definitely hit the spot. If you ever find yourself traveling through Nairobi, I would recommend taking the time to stop in.
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