Upper Hill5 min read
Eating well in Upper Hill
A working district empties in the evening, which changes where you eat. Lunch, dinner, groceries and deliveries around Upper Hill, Nairobi.
Upper Hill feeds several thousand office workers at lunchtime and rather few people at nine at night. That single fact shapes eating here more than any restaurant recommendation would, so it is worth understanding before your first evening.
We have deliberately not listed named restaurants. Places open and close, and a guide full of addresses that no longer exist is worse than no guide. What follows is the shape of it, which changes far more slowly.
Lunch is the easy meal
Between noon and two, Upper Hill is well served. Hotel restaurants, cafés in the office towers, and a healthy trade in Kenyan staples — ugali, sukuma wiki, nyama choma, stews with rice or chapati — at prices that surprise visitors used to Western capitals.
If you are here on business, the hotel restaurants are also where a good deal of the district’s business gets done. Booking is worth it for anything that matters.
Dinner takes more thought
By seven the district is quiet. There are hotel dining rooms, and they are perfectly good, but a fortnight of them wears thin. The two realistic alternatives:
- Drive to Kilimani or Westlands. This is where Nairobi eats out — a genuinely good range, from Ethiopian and Indian to Italian and Japanese. Ten to twenty-five minutes depending on the hour.
- Order in. Delivery apps cover Upper Hill thoroughly and are cheap. This is what most people staying more than a few nights actually do on a weeknight.
The third option, and the reason people book apartments rather than rooms: cook. Not every night — but the ability to make breakfast at six and something simple at ten changes a long stay more than any restaurant does.
Groceries
Kenya’s supermarket chains have branches in and around Upper Hill and in the nearby malls, stocking much what you would expect plus a good deal you would not. Produce is excellent and cheap — avocados, mangoes, passion fruit, tomatoes — and worth buying from the local greengrocers and market stalls rather than the supermarket.
- Bring a bag. Plastic carrier bags are banned in Kenya and shops do not hand them out.
- Carry M-Pesa. Supermarkets take cards; the greengrocer on the corner takes M-Pesa and cash.
- Buy coffee here. Kenyan coffee is among the best in the world and absurdly cheap at source. It also makes the obvious present to take home.
If you are here for the hospitals
Families sitting with someone through treatment eat badly, almost without exception — hospital canteens and whatever is quickest. Having a kitchen fifteen minutes’ walk away is worth more than it sounds, and we have written separately about what else matters on that kind of stay.