Breakfast
The first meal of the day varies widely. Standard fare in a hoteli (a small restaurant) consists of a cup of sweet chai (tea) and a chapati or a doorstep of white bread thickly spread with margarine (on both sides, and often the edges too). At the other extreme, if you're staying in a luxury hotel or lodge, breakfast is usually a lavish acreage of hot and cold buffets that you can't possibly do justice to. In the average mid-priced hotel , you'll get "full breakfast", like something from an English B&B - greasy sausage, bacon and eggs, with tea or instant coffee (in a pot) and soggy "toast" (which is rarely in fact toasted).

Home-style cooking
If meals are unlikely to be a lasting memory, at least you'll never go hungry. In any hoteli there's always a number of predictable dishes intended to fill you up at the least cost. Potatoes, rice and especially ugali (a stiff, cornmeal porridge) are the national staples, eaten with chicken, goat, beef, or vegetable stew, various kinds of spinach, beans and sometimes fish. Portions are usually gigantic; half-portions (ask for nusu ) aren't much smaller. But even in small towns, more and more cafés are appearing where most of the menu is fried - eggs, sausages, chips, fish, chicken and burgers.

Snacks , which can easily become meals, include samosas, chapatis, paratha, miniature kebabs, roasted corncobs, mandaazi (sweet, puffy, deep-fried dough cakes) and "egg-bread". Mandaazi are made before breakfast and served until evening time, when they've become cold and solid. Egg-bread (misleadingly translated from the Swahili mkate mayai ) is a light wheat-flour "pancake" wrapped around fried eggs and minced meat, usually cooked on a huge griddle. While you won't find it everywhere, it's a delicious Kenyan response to the creeping burger menace. Snacks sold on the street include cassava chips and, if you're very lucky, termites (which go well as a bar snack with beer).

The standard blow-out feast for most Kenyans is a huge pile of nyama choma (roast meat). Nyama choma is usually eaten at a purpose-built nyama choma bar, with beer and music (live or on a jukebox) the standard accompaniment, and ugali and greens optional. You go to the kitchen and order by weight (half a kilo is plenty) direct from the butcher's hook or out of the fridge. There's usually a choice of goat, beef or mutton. After roasting, the meat is brought to your table on a wooden platter and chopped to bite-size with a sharp knife. Kuku choma is roast chicken.

Restaurant meals
Indian restaurants in the larger towns, notably Nairobi and Mombasa, are generally excellent (locally, there's often a strong Indian influence in hoteli food as well), with dal lunches a good stand-by and much fancier regional dishes widely available too.

When you splurge, apart from eating Indian, it will usually be in hotel restaurants , with food often very similar to what you might be served in a restaurant at home. It will rarely cost more than Ksh1000 a head, though there's a handful of classy establishments in Nairobi and on the coast which take delight in charging, for Kenya, outrageous prices for lavish meals - up to Ksh3000 - generally with some justification.

Kenya's seafood and meat are renowned and they are the basis of most serious meals. Game meat is a bit of a Kenyan speciality, supposedly farmed on ranches, though there is a fair amount of illegal poaching still going on to supply the trade. Giraffe, zebra, impala, crocodile and ostrich all regularly appear at various restaurants, and often on a weekly basis in hotel buffets. Gazelle and impala is especially good, as is zebra; not the horse meat you might imagine. Carnivore in Nairobi is one of the best places to try game meat.

The lodges usually have buffet lunches at about Ksh800-1000, which can be great value if you're really hungry, with table-loads of salads and cold meat. Among Kenya's exotic cuisines, you'll find Italian restaurants and pizzerias, various Chinese options, and French, Japanese, Thai, and even Korean food.

Vegetarians
If you're a vegetarian staying in tourist-class hotels, you should have no problems, as there's usually a meat-free pasta dish, or else the usual omelettes. Vegetarians on a strict budget don't have an easy time because meat is the conventional focus of any kind of special meal - in other words, any meal not eaten at home - and hotelis seldom have much else to accompany the starch. Even vegetable stew is normally cooked in meat gravy. Nor are salads and green vegetables served much in the cheaper hotelis (and if they are, make sure they're fresh). Eggs, at least, can be had almost anywhere, and fresh milk is distributed widely in wax paper tetra-packs, as well as UHT or fresh in thin plastic packs. With bread and tinned margarine, two more staples available everywhere, you won't starve. Look out for Indian vegetarian restaurants where you can often eat remarkably well at a very low cost.

Fruit
Fruit is a major delight. Bananas, avocados, pawpaws and pineapples are in the markets all year, mangoes and citrus fruits more seasonally. Look out for passion fruit (the familiar shrivelled brown variety, and the sweeter and less acidic smooth yellow ones), cape gooseberries, custard apples and guavas - all highly distinctive and delicious. On the coast, roasted cashew nuts are cheap, especially at Kilifi where they're grown and processed (never buy any with dark marks on them), while coconuts are filling and nutritious, going through several satisfying changes of condition (all edible) before becoming the familiar hard brown nuts.

Drinking
The national beverage is chai - tea. Universally drunk at breakfast and as a pick-me-up at any time, it's a weird variant on the classic British brew: milk, water, lots of sugar and tea leaves, brought to the boil in a kettle and served scalding hot. It must eventually do diabolical dental damage, but it's addictive and very reviving. Instant coffee - fresh is rare - is normally available in hotelis as well, but it's expensive (ironically, as the country is a large coffee producer), so not as popular as tea. The main tea-producing region is around Kericho in the west, but the best tea is made on the coast. Upcountry it's all too often a tea bag in a cup of vaguely warm water or milk.

Soft drinks (sodas) are usually very cheap, and crates of Coke, Fanta and Sprite find their way to the wildest corners of the country where, uncooled, they're pretty disgusting. Krest, a bitter lemon, is a lot more pleasant. Krest also makes a ginger ale, but it's watery and insipid; instead go for Stoney Tangawizi (ginger beer) which has more of a punch. Sometimes you can get Vimto (a mixed-fruit concoction), and occasionally plain soda water. There are fresh fruit juices available in the towns, especially on the coast (Lamu is fruit juice heaven). Passion fruit, the cheapest, is excellent, though nowadays it's likely to be watered-down concentrate. Some places serve a variety: you'll sometimes find carrot juice and even tiger milk - made from tiger nuts (which are actually a type of tuber). Bottled Picana mango juice is also available at some shops that sell sodas.

Bottled mineral or spring water is relatively expensive but widely available. Mains water may be drinkable, but it's safer to stick with bottled.