Snapshots: Five-star hotels are grossly overrated

 Five-star hotel food is overrated     Photo: Courtesy

I have never liked the food cooked in big hotels because the stuff just sits in your stomach like a stone.

This could be because those hotels cook for white tongues and stomachs, which are accustomed to tasteless foods.

The chef marinates the stuff, adds in a cocktail of spices, sugar, soda, pepper and so many other things, such that when the food lands in your mouth, the tongue has no idea whether you are eating fish, chicken or fried rubber!

When that stuff lands in an African stomach, digestive juices wonder, “What has this idiot eaten this time?” and angrily initiate the mother of all strikes.

Now, because most of us only engage with big hotels during workshops and seminars funded by our foreign masters, we consider it our turn to eat. So, we wolf down everything on the breakfast table, chomp down every bit of stuff offered for lunch and swallow very strange things for dinner.

This takes our tummies, accustomed to digesting ugali and sukuma wiki blended with mutura, into a spin. They ignore the food. So, morning after morning, we straddle the toilet seat and heave, but nothing goes. By the third day, we are so constipated that we start walking around with the pained look of a traffic police officer who is wondering how to explain M-Pesa deposits amounting to Sh2.35 million in three months to the vetting board.

And you know what they are charging for that constipated tummy? So much cash you can buy a goat, a chicken and leave spare change for a whole sack of sweet potatoes!

The last time I stepped into one such hotel, I was so thoroughly frisked that I feared the hotel guards were privy to a scar on a part of my body that I dare not mention because this is a family newspaper. But I was pleasantly surprised when the menu came and I noticed that it had a section for ‘African cuisine.’ Wow!

“This chapati and beef stew... is it the same as the one you cook in your house?” I asked the waitress who was so pretty, I considered suing the management of the hotel for keeping her at work at 9pm.

She smiled so sweetly and said yes. I placed my order and then proceeded to luxuriate on a double tot of something that I suspected was so expensive that if the equivalent in cash landed in my village pastor’s Sunday offering, the poor man would faint screaming, “Iluminati! Iluminati!”

But when she served that dish with a flourish, I realised I had made a grave mistake. The chapo didn’t look familiar and the meat did not taste like it had been harvested from a Kenyan cow. Cost? Sh3,250 or something. I need not mention that sort of cash can keep me sufficiently and deliciously nourished for weeks at my local eatery.

Needless to say, I woke up the next morning, sat on the toilet seat and heaved and heaved for hours, but that exotic five-star hotel chapo, like judges who don’t want to quit at the age of 70, remained put.