EATING OUT: How hard is it to deliver hot food?

This past Friday, my friend paid me an impromptu visit. You know how we’ve been conditioned in Kenyan society; you must always feed your guests.

Growing up with my grandma has had repercussions, like me always insisting that a guest should at the very least have a cup of strong tea at my house regardless of whether they just spent all afternoon making trips back and forth from a buffet. Having no food in the house, and the month still being “Njaanuary”, I started to fret over what they would eat.

A quick browse through Jumia Food and I discovered that Debonairs Pizza had a very tempting Friday offer — two large or standard pizzas for the price of one. I quickly browsed through the flavours on offer and decided to get two standard ones at Sh1,000 — a Something Meaty pizza and a BBQ chicken one. I was notified that delivery would be in about 40 minutes, and the beauty of the app was that I was able to track the live location of my order hence didn’t have to constantly keep pestering him with the umefika wapi? calls.

An hour later and there was still no pizza in sight. There is something about the anticipation of food that always heightens one’s hunger even if they were not that famished. My friend, who had insisted that he wasn’t hungry, had by this time started loudly wondering if my order had perhaps been cancelled.

As if on cue, I got a call from Jumia informing me that there had been a delay in dispatching my order because of a backlog of orders that evening. The Friday offer is seemingly very popular. My pizzas, I was told, would be delivered in the next 20 minutes.

Forty-five minutes later, however, there was no pizza in sight. My friend had by now resorted to eating the jaggery I had brought back from a recent road trip. My resolve to regale him with tales from the road trip so he wouldn’t think about how hungry he was starting to wane. I got another call from Jumia telling me that since my order was terribly late, they would shave off Sh300 off my bill.

Almost three hours after placing the order, the pizzas were finally delivered. It was heading to midnight and I had even started dozing off. The pizzas were cold, the cheese had hardened and the vegetables looked soggy and shrivelled.

The Something Meaty pizza was laden with various types of meat- which had been the initial attraction- but it turned to be the least favourite. The BBQ Chicken pizza, which had mushrooms and a rich bbq sauce, would actually be a decent dish if served hot off the oven. We finished eating the pizzas in a matter of minutes, mostly fuelled by hunger and the culmination of a long delayed gratification. Serving pizzas cold should be a crime for which pizza houses should get sued.