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Nairobi has moved towards fashion fast in recent years, but it may have pulled a first just lately, in the form of a restaurant that’s too cool for comfort except for seasoned internationals. Japanese restaurant Onami has brought to the city the edge that now holds in London for utilitarian art and exquisite, fresh food.

Managed by the same group that last year opened the Art Caffe at Westgate, Onami is truly a different animal to its elder sister. The Art Caffe is the epitomy of 1990s-style café culture, vested in customised coffee and excellent bread and pastries, serving a now large traffic of ‘they who meet’ - to the extent of being top spot for the city’s business networkers.

Onami, by contrast, is a hidden treasure. Tucked away on the third floor of the same Westgate complex, in an obscure corner entrance beside the Silverbird book and video store, nothing about the frontage of Onami gives away the light and air within.

Step inside, and the tiny entrance opens to an eating hall so powerfully artistic and airy as to be like stepping off a plane in the Middle East into a wall of heat.

Shattered nerves become still. The floating sounds, Japanese calls from the open-plan Japanese kitchen, ambiance and spread simply radiate peace.

It’s a contrast that has already seen the restaurant adopted at speed by the Japanese community itself, as well as both of Kenya’s former first families. But it is a restaurant where few but the elite have yet ventured.

Opened just two months ago, it is, all out, the work of a perfectionist. An expanse of polished grey stone floor, high ceiling, and minimalist feng shui décor are backdrop to dishes like seared beef curled in flowers, and shock-frozen tuna flown in directly from Japan.

“We wanted to build the whole picture,” says project manager Sagi, “a full and different dining experience, based on fresh ingredients, seasonal foods, and Japanese art and culture”.

The staff all speak Japanese. The restaurant’s four Sushi chefs, all Chinese, were trained in Japan.

And it is the food that clinches it. Onami has created a space of sun, light, air, calm and harmony, but were it not for its fusion menu of first-class Japanese delicacies, followed by puddings to die for, it might not linger in the visitor’s heart and mind all day long.

“Now this is really Japanese food,” says my own pre-teenage son, disappointed only the week before by the offerings of another Japanese restaurant in town that touched none of his memories of eating the real thing sat in the Far East.

But his appreciation is as nothing to mine when the pudding arrives. White chocolate and wasabi may not grab too many eyes as anything but a concept for the adventurous. Saki and Chocolate soufflé might look similarly improbable. But the fact is, I haven’t eaten a desert as good in my entire time in Kenya. They are so good as to be, actually, beyond words.

For which, thanks to Onami.

Written by Jenny Luesby for African Laughter