Food has always been an incentive for travel but culinary tourism is growing as never before, with operators competing to offer gastronomic experiences that go above and beyond the traditional cookery course.
From sourdough baking retreats in Alpujarras to sushi-making classes in Osaka and truffle hunting in Slovenia, the world is increasingly stuffed with experiences for epicurean globetrotters. According to travel tech company Hotelbeds, food tourism is expected to be the fastest-growing segment of luxury travel between now and 2030.
Perhaps the most audacious pitch is Kitchen in the Wild, a new company offering five-night retreats in dramatic locations, co-hosted by well-known chefs. Founded by British chef and food writer Valentine Warner and events organiser Clare Isaacs, a former food programmer at Oxfordshire’s Wilderness festival, it describes itself as a specialist in “far-flung adventures for the culinary curious”.
I had a taster of the company’s offering ahead of its first trips, which will take place in Kenya this October at El Karama, a boutique safari lodge set in a 15,000-acre wildlife reserve in Laikipia county. There will be two five-day retreats, each for a maximum of 18 people and each led by a different chef. Week one will be Santiago Lastra, charismatic Mexican-born owner of London restaurant KOL (currently ranked 17 in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list). Week two will be Jackson Boxer, founder of Dove, Henri and Brunswick House and poster boy of the modern British food scene.
Guests will enjoy round-the-clock feasting and facetime with the headline acts, plus cookery demos, bush dinners and foraging and fishing trips alongside plentiful game drives.
The ticket price for the experience is $12,000 per person — which made me choke a bit. But the company’s founders are confident they know their market. Before Kitchen in the Wild, they ran Kitchen on the Edge, a culinary escape at a hotel in Norway’s rugged Lofoten archipelago which operates along similar lines, combining residencies from celebrity chefs including Angela Hartnett, Rick Stein and Nuno Mendes, with wholesome activities such as cod fishing, knife making and wood carving. It has attracted more than 400 guests over the last five years.
“People come for the food and the location,” says Warner, “but the real luxury here is the access they get to the chefs and experts, because everyone is living and eating together for the full five days. By the end it feels a bit like a family. One of our Lofoten guests returned five times.”
Don’t come expecting a fine-dining experience, he says — the fun lies in seeing chefs thrown in at the deep end. “New ingredients, and the practicalities of cooking in far-flung and adventurous places, produces some of the most exciting cooking, I think.”
Warner, a well-known chef in his own right, will also cook on the trips but his primary role is maître d’, something he excels at, combining a posh gung-ho-ness with a great sense of humour and a passion for wildlife.
Set in the foothills of Mount Kenya, El Karama is splendidly isolated — getting there from Nairobi requires an hour’s propeller plane ride to Nanyuki, and then an hour and a half’s bone-rattling drive through the bush. I’ve spotted zebras, giraffes, warthogs and elephants before I’ve even arrived.
I’m greeted by co-owner Sophie Grant, a former NGO worker who runs the lodge with her third-generation Kenyan husband Murray. She offers me a glass of fresh mango juice by a tree-lined pool humming with life: noisy weaver birds, mottled lizards and neon dragonflies. In the distance, a trio of dik-diks pick their way delicately through the grass.
Accommodation is half a dozen canvas, wood and thatched cottages scattered among wild, bird-filled gardens, each one connected by paths so meandering that I get lost on more than one occasion.
El Karama is a standard-bearer for sustainability — it runs exclusively on solar power and rainwater, and grows or sources all of its produce within a 70km radius. It’s been instrumental in a number of conservation initiatives, including a successful campaign to reintroduce the black rhino to Laikipia. All of its 100 staff are Kenyan, and it runs several social enterprise schemes: “Mutual benefit is everything in conservancy,” says Grant.
The place is comfortable but not cosseted. Energy-intensive hair dryers are banned; showers before sunrise are cold. And it’s almost all open-air, so you always have the spine-tingly feeling of wildlife just over your shoulder.
“People are often a bit out of their element here, they have to shed their skins a bit,” says Grant. “We want to sensitise them to their surroundings and the environment, but in a non-finger-wagging way.”
The first activity on the agenda is bush foraging with local plant expert Anne Powys, founder of the Suyan Soul eco-retreat and one of the country’s leading ethnobotanists. Armed with a well-worn machete, she is soon wading through the bush, plucking leaves, pulling plants, digging roots and thrusting the aromatic results under our nose. “This false ebony is used for teeth brushing, and that citrusy, peppery leaf is wild basil,” she says. “And this is Rutaceae, a kind of perfumed curry leaf.”
Our safari guide Kimtai Lelei stops us in a gully to point out leopard and lion tracks. Further on, we come across a family of hippos grunting happily in the river.
Back at the lodge, we gather for a dinner cooked by Warner in the open-air “river mess”. We start with fireside “bitings” (Kenyan snacks) of Boran beef from El Karama’s own herd and bottles of Kenyan Tusker lager. Then it’s handmade ravioli stuffed with some of our foraged plants.
Conversation is good — my fellow guests include a South African conservationist and a Kenyan filmmaker. I arrive back at my lodge, dog-tired, to find the lanterns lit and a hot water bottle in my bed.
I’m woken at dawn by a member of staff bearing a flask of tea and some homemade ginger biscuits (which are promptly stolen, when my back is turned, by a wily vervet monkey that adeptly unzips my mosquito net).
Breakfast, prepared by El Karama’s head chef Jane Wanjiru, is poached eggs topped with freshly caught termites, which are fried until crispy and have a pleasant flavour rather like dry-roasted nuts. I wolf them down with spoonfuls of kachumbari, a sort of Kenyan salsa of tomatoes, onions, coriander and chilli, on the side.
Wanjiru will demo some Kenyan cooking at Kitchen in the Wild — one night she serves us a classic meal of beef stew, starchy ugali, sukuma wiki (collard greens) and chapattis, eaten with our fingers. “I’m looking forward to the chefs visiting us,” she says. “We learn a lot from them and we also teach them new things.”
After breakfast, Sophie takes me on a tour of the shamba, or kitchen garden, where much of the lodge’s organic food is grown. It’s overflowing with tomatoes, paw paws, chillies, fennel, yams, berries, aubergines and edible flowers. We also visit the ranch which supplies the lodge with meat and milk (and local traders with any surplus, at cost price).
We return to the main lodge to find that Warner has set up a little wood-fired stove for a cooking demo, on a terrace overlooking the trees. He soon has me seasoning fish, chopping bush herbs and whittling acacia kebab sticks. I end up with the smell and taste of the bush in my hair, on my clothes and under my nails.
After lunch, I set out with Lelei in search of more wildlife. We see baboons, two types of zebra, giraffes, waterbucks, oryx and dozens of different birds; by the river, I stumble on an African finfoot, a rarely seen duck-like bird which causes great excitement.
The sun starts to set. We drive over a hill. And suddenly, there in the dusk, I see a lantern-lit table for 10 laid under a statuesque boscia tree. There’s a roaring camp fire and sundowners clinking with ice; Warner’s got chicken on a spit. As the stars begin to emerge, the air fills with the chatter and whoop of frogs, nightjars and crickets.
Kitchen in the Wild isn’t the only company now offering five-star foodie trips into the Kenyan bush. From December this year, the 100-year-old safari company Cottar’s will launch a five-day food and foraging experience in the Maasai Mara, hosted by Kenyan celebrity chef Kiran Jethwa ($7,420 per person).
Is it wrong that Kitchen in the Wild is importing its chefs from overseas? “We’re not a Kenyan travel company — the point of Kitchen in the Wild is it’s a moveable feast,” says Warner. “We want to work with chefs who are good at responding to their surroundings and whose cooking exudes a sense of place — but it’s also important that they are good company.”
Kitchen in the Wild’s next stop will be Scotland, which will be a very different (and differently priced) gastronomic experience. For now, though, it’s mangoes, termites and Boran beef on the menu — and hold the haggis.
Details
Alice Lascelles was a guest of Kitchen in the Wild (kitcheninthewild.org); bookings for the company’s Kenya trips, which cost $12,000 per person for five nights, are via Kenya-based Sophia Rose Travel (sophiarosetravel.com)
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