Road trip food ‘is just there’

Dallas Inn Narok, Kaplong-Narok-Maai Road, Narok. Photo | Pool

What you need to know:

  • On the 8-hour Easy Coach bus to Kisumu and for lunch, our driver stopped at Dallas Inn Narok, Kaplong-Narok-Maai Road, Narok

Narok, to me, is a transit town which I usually pass through on my way to the Maasai Mara, or to Western Kenya. Recently, my two siblings and I were on the 8-hour Easy Coach bus to Kisumu and for lunch, our driver stopped at Dallas Inn. There wasn’t much choice if one wanted to get a meal— you either went to this transit restaurant or stopped by the nearby kiosk or mini mart to buy snacks. Having left Nairobi at 7.30am in order to get to Kisumu before the 7pm curfew, we hadn’t had breakfast, and a hot meal was all we could think about. 


Serving customers who stop by on buses which travel through these routes daily must be good business. I’ve even heard that some of these restaurants offer commissions or free lunches to the driver and his crew every time they bring clients, which in a sea of competition, is just smart marketing. The buses also stop for all of 20 minutes, so the restaurants have to be very fast and efficient in serving people. At Dallas Inn, there was a menu on a board above the main counter, so you simply chose what you wanted to eat, then paid at the counter and got a ticket in return, which you then handed to the lady doing the serving. 


We chose to dine in-house as nothing sucks like having to contend with stews and plastic bags on a moving bus. Altogether we got two plates of rice and beef which came with a small helping of cabbage, matoke and beef, as well as one chapati. 


“How’s the food?” I asked my younger brother. 


“Iko tu hapo,” he responded with articulation that would put Ngugi wa Thiong’o to shame.


He was right. When you’ve been on a bus, bored from staring into nothingness and hungry from not having had anything to eat, the food does the job of satiating those pangs. The space is clean and the prices are fair (we paid Sh980 total for three people), but the food, to use Kenyan English, “is just there”. I was also very impressed that they were able to serve two full buses with such efficiency that at the end of the slotted 20 minutes, we were the last people to return to our seats on our bus.


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