Mbuzi Munch are quite adept at getting the perfect restaurant spot. It is the first restaurant you spot when you walk in to Lavington Mall using the pedestrian walkway.

It is equally well-placed at Galleria Mall, Lang’ata Road. A meal here may start with a cocktail or water as one waits for their order to be made.

They pride themselves in their charred meat options, more so their goat choma.

They even have a goat patty burger, a novelty as most restaurants have either a beef or chicken burger. 

On one sunny Sunday afternoon, we meet with one of my friends from primary school here for a catch-up.

We order cocktails and laugh about how we would bond over gulped hot porridge and githeri mixed with bananas back then.

We take more cocktails and laugh about how impressionable we were as young children as the entire Class Eight  stream (including us) wanted to be neurosurgeons, after we were given a weekend reading assignment of Ben Carson’s Think Big.

The Ankara-pillowed chairs are comfortable to sit on as the sun slowly starts setting in the horizon. She orders a leg of goat and I order a burger with lyonnaise potatoes.

Potent cocktails

 We laugh and wonder where time went. How we were in awe of people in their twenties and would view them as old and now we are the old adults making big decisions, shaping families and the next generation of the future.

That is the funny thing about time. It does not bolt out of the stable. It is incremental and comes at you in seconds, minutes and before you know it you are not crying from being homesick at a boarding school, but are crying from the body pain that comes from sitting and standing up due to advanced age.

So we make a toast to now, and milking every moment while we have the good fortune of good health.

We decide that such wisdom is latent in us and was shaken loose by a few potent cocktails. 

Her goat platter arrives hot and steaming. She is undecided about how it tastes so I jump in to help her make up her mind.

The goat is well done and slightly charred. Thing is, it has been cooked in a surfeit of onions.

Every bite is a cross between a dry fry and nyama choma. It is confusing to the taste buds at best and a desecration of good old nyama choma at worst. Nyama choma was never meant to be stewed.

The char instead of being the main guest of the dish, now becomes a bother as the smokiness and the bitter char overpowers the onions.

Luckily for me, my mbuzi muncher burger is delicious. My plate of Lyonnaise potatoes arrives crunchy, hot and largely uncooked.

A bite just reveals the raw potato taste contained underneath the oily veneer.

And yes, I know how raw potatoes taste, I bit into a few as a child as I was trying to figure out how chips could possibly come from potatoes.