SOURCE TO PLATE
TEXT
KATY FENTRESS
CATCH
OF
THE
DAY
It’s not every day you get to live your
dream; youthful fantasies so often get
shelved once adulthood kicks in.
Not so for Yuki Kashiwagi and Kyohei
Fukui, two young chefs who hail from
Osaka, Japan and are currently living
out their dream in Nairobi.
At Cheka, Nairobi’s only Japaneseowned restaurant, all the seafood is
micro-sourced from small-scale
fishermen up and down the coast.
30.
“Kyohei and I were best friends at
high school and we always talked
about opening a restaurant together” smiles Yuki from the across
the table at their recently-opened
Lavington restaurant, Cheka.
“When I decided to open a place
in Nairobi, he was the first person I
thought of!”
Around the time that Yuki called
him, roughly a year ago, Kyohei had
been working for a shipping company in Vietnam. He underlines
that the decision to abandon it all
to move to Kenya was a no-brainer.
“I was a licensed chef in Japan but
found it difficult to open my own
place because I was young and
struggled to attract investors,” he
explains. “After working in Vietnam
for a few years though, I had put
aside some money, so decided it
was a good time to invest.”
Yuki meanwhile had been working
as a car importer in Mombasa and
through his love for fishing, had
made friends with Seith, a local
fisherman with whom he would
embark on frequent expeditions in his small dugout canoe.
“I worked as a sushi chef back in
Japan, so I started cutting the fish
I caught there and eating it raw,”
he explains. Before long Yuki was
looking to break away from the car
business and focus all his ener-