Food has always been an incentive for travel, but culinary tourism is growing like never before, with operators competing to offer gastronomic experiences that go beyond the traditional cookery course.
From sourdough baking holidays in the Alpujarras to sushi-making classes in Osaka and truffle hunting in Slovenia, the world is increasingly brimming with experiences for epicurean globetrotters. According to travel technology company Hotelbeds, food tourism is expected to be the fastest growing segment of luxury travel between now and 2030.
Perhaps the boldest pitch is Kitchen in the Wild, a new company offering five-night vacations to dramatic locations co-hosted by celebrity chefs. Founded by British chef and food writer Valentine Warner and event organizer 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 located on a 15,000-hectare game 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. The first week will be Santiago Lastra, charismatic Mexican-born owner of London’s KOL restaurant (currently ranked 17th on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list). The second week will be Jackson Boxer, founder of Dove, Henri and Brunswick House and poster child of the modern British food scene.
Guests will enjoy round-the-clock feasting and face time with the headliners, plus cooking demonstrations, bush dinners and foraging and fishing trips, along with plenty of board games.
The ticket price for the experience is $12,000 per person – which made me choke up a little. But the company’s founders are sure they know their market. Before Kitchen in the Wild, they ran Kitchen on the Edge, a culinary escape in a hotel in Norway’s rugged Lofoten archipelago, which runs along similar lines, combining residencies by celebrity chefs such as Angela Hartnett, Rick Stein and Nuno Mendes, with healthy activities such as cod fishing, knife making and wood carving. It has attracted more than 400 guests over the past five years.
“People come for the food and the location,” says Warner, “but the real luxury here is access they go to the chiefs and experts, because they all live and eat together for the full five days. It feels a bit like a family in the end. One of our Lofoten guests returned five times.”
Don’t come expecting a gourmet experience, he says – the fun is in watching the chefs throw down. “New ingredients and cooking practices in remote and adventurous places produce 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 main role is as maître d’, something he excels at, combining an elegant gung-ho-ness with a great sense of humor and a passion for wild animals.
Nestled at the foot of Mount Kenya, El Karama is brilliantly isolated – getting there from Nairobi requires a helicopter ride to Nanyuki, and then an hour and a half drive through the bush. I saw zebras, giraffes, porcupines and elephants even before I 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 next to a pool of trees buzzing with life: noisy wading birds, spotted lizards and neon dragonflies. In the distance, a trio of dik-diks pick their way delicately through the grass.
Accommodation is half a dozen cloth, wood and thatch lodges scattered among wild, bird-filled gardens, each connected by paths so winding that I get lost on more than one occasion.
El Karama is a standard bearer for sustainability – it runs exclusively on solar energy and rainwater, and grows or sources all of its production within a 70km radius. It has been instrumental in a number of conservation initiatives, including a successful campaign to reintroduce the black rhino to Laikipia. All of its 100 employees are Kenyan and it runs several social enterprise schemes: “Mutual benefit is everything in conservation,” says Grant.
The seat is comfortable, but not covered. Hair dryers with intense energy are prohibited; showers before sunrise are cold. And it’s almost all in the open air, so you always have the keen sense of wildlife just over your shoulder.
“People are often a bit out of their element here, they have to shed their skin a bit,” says Grant. “We want to sensitize them to their surroundings and 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’s soon prowling through the bushes, plucking leaves, pulling plants, digging up roots and shoving the fragrant results right under our noses. “This fake black is used for brushing teeth, and that citrusy, peppery leaf is wild basil,” she says. “And this is Rutacaea, a kind of perfumed curry leaf.”
Our safari guide Kimtai Lelei stops us at a pit to point out leopard and lion tracks. Next, we come across a family of hippopotamus 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 “bites” (Kenyan bites) of Boran beef from El Karama’s own herd and bottles of Kenyan Tusker lager. Then there are handmade ravioli filled with some of our foraged plants.
The conversation is good – my guests include a South African conservative and a Kenyan filmmaker. I arrive at my lodge, dog-tired, to find the headlights on and a hot water bottle on my bed.
I am awakened at dawn by a member of staff carrying a flask of tea and some home-made gingerbread cookies (which are promptly stolen, when my back is turned, by a sly monkey who expertly opens my mosquito net).
Breakfast, prepared by El Karama’s head chef Jane Wanjiru, is hard-boiled eggs filled with freshly caught termites, which are fried until crispy and have a pleasant aroma rather like dry-roasted nuts. I wolf them down with a spoon picklesa kind of Kenyan salsa with tomatoes, onions, cilantro and chilies, on the side.
Wanjiru will demonstrate some Kenyan cooking at Kitchen in the Wild – one night she serves us a classic meal of beef stew, starch RESIDENCE, push week (collard greens) and chapattis, eaten with fingers. “I can’t wait for the chefs to visit 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 field, or the kitchen garden, where most of the lodge’s organic food is grown. It is overflowing with tomatoes, paw paws, chili peppers, fennel, pancake, berries, eggplant and edible flowers. We also visit the farm that supplies the lodge with meat and milk (and the local traders with any surplus, at cost price).
We return to the main lodge to find that Warner has set up a small wood stove for a cooking demonstration, on a terrace overlooking the trees. Soon he has me tasting fish, cutting bush herbs and beating 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 zebras, giraffes, otters, oryx and dozens of different birds; by the river, I stumble upon an African bird, a rarely seen duck-like bird that causes great excitement.
The sun begins to set. We drive over a hill. And suddenly, there in the twilight, I see a lantern-lit table for 10 people, placed under a Boscia statue tree. There’s a roaring campfire and ice-clattering sunsets; Warner has chicken on a spit. As the stars begin to come out, the air fills with the chatter and chirping of frogs, lilacs and crickets.
Kitchen in the Wild is not the only company now offering five-star food tours in the Kenyan bush. From December this year, 100-year-old safari company Cottars will launch a five-day food and foraging experience in the Maasai Mara, hosted by celebrity Kenyan chef Kiran Jethwa ($7,420 per person).
Is it wrong that Kitchen in the Wild is importing its chefs from abroad? “We’re not a Kenyan travel company – the point of Kitchen in the Wild is that it’s a mobile holiday,” says Warner. “We want to work with chefs who are good at responding to their environment and whose cooking exudes a sense of place – but it’s also important that they’re good company.”
Kitchen in the Wild’s next stop will be Scotland, which will be a very different (and priced) gastronomic experience. At the moment, though, it’s mangoes, termites and beef Boran on the menu – and they’re holding haggis.
The details
Alice Lascelles was a guest on Kitchen in the Wild (kitcheninthewild.org); Bookings for the company’s trips to Kenya, which cost $12,000 per person for five nights, are through Kenya-based Sophia Rose Travel (sophiarosetravel.com)
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