Carnivore Restaurant

Legendary game-meat restaurant where waiters circle with sword-skewered cuts until you raise the flag

Carnivore is Nairobi's most famous restaurant and one of the best-known in Africa, established in 1980 in the Langata area near Wilson Airport. The concept is simple and relentless: a fixed-price "Beast of a Feast" in which waiters carry sword-skewers of different meats from table to table, carving directly onto your plate. You eat until you raise a small white flag to signal surrender.

Meats typically include beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and several game options such as ostrich (both fillet and meatballs from the gizzard), crocodile (mild, slightly fishy), and hartebeest. The meats are marinated and cooked over open charcoal, and the quality is reliably good. The setting is a large thatched pavilion with outdoor braziers visible from the tables.

It is a tourist institution and unabashedly so, but it remains genuinely enjoyable. Reservations are recommended on weekends. The restaurant is on Langata Road, about 20 minutes by taxi from downtown.

eating out restaurant langata
A story
The restaurant opened in 1980 with the concept of serving game meat — ostrich, crocodile, hartebeest, and more — on long swords over charcoal braziers. For decades it served a wider range of game than it can today; current Kenyan wildlife law has restricted the menu, but the spectacle and the sheer quantity of meat remain intact.