In the most basic local restaurant, decent meals can be had for less than £1. For fancier meals in touristy places, expect to pay up to £14 - rarely more - for a large meal of international-style dishes. For culinary culture, the association with Indian Ocean trade has produced distinctive regional cooking, where rice and fish, flavoured with coconut, tamarind and exotic spices, are the main ingredients.

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).

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.

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.

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