Rapha Bake and Brew Garden is not your typical restaurant with fancy neon lights or outdoor banners to attract a myriad of customers.
Instead, it attracts its customers using a coffee tree and spinach grown on an elevated-improvised tyre garden at the entrance.
The interior is not the run-of-the-mill kind either.
If there’s a skill that MrWangai Kamau knows best, it is baking. He did it for over 20 years, helping make some of the biggest bakeries around a household name.
When he felt that it was time to call it quits and do something to make a name for himself for a change, it was little surprise that he naturally gravitated towards setting up an eatery that specialises in serving baked food.
From baked ugali to pork, mutton, French fries and chicken, Mr Kamau’s Rapha Bake and Brew Garden in Kiambu Town has quickly gained a reputation as the place for the most sumptuous baked food.
His entrepreneurship journey started in 2013, when he founded Rapha Foods Limited. Initially, his restaurant specialised in coffee and pastries. However, in a town already flooded with pastry and coffee shops, customers did not see the reason to rush to his establishment.
This offered him his first lesson on surviving in a cut-throat business environment such as the hospitality industry.
“Some friends who had tasted my baked pork and ugali said I should not just specialise in pastries and coffees. It took a friends’ advice for me to include baked ugali and pork to the menu after rigorous testing,” Mr Kamau, who ventured into organic food in 2019, says.
“Then, I remembered that there are some guys who do not take baked pork so I reasoned that if I have to give them an alternative. So, I started with baked pork and baked goat only,” he adds.
Thereafter, he added baked ugali, potatoes, and free-range chickens to the menu.
“Everything we serve, from the ugali to the meat is baked.”
Food prices range from Sh100 for a pie, fresh-squeezed juice, muffins, and coffee to Sh1,000 for a kilo of baked pork, mutton, or ugali.
To guarantee the quality of the food, Mr Kamau sources it from local farmers.
“At the end of the day we would want to do to partner with farmers so that our customers know where their organic food is coming from,” he adds.
But it is not just the food that is an attraction. Mr Kamau has gone to great lengths to ensure that eating at the restaurant is as a pleasant eperience as the food.
Rapha Bake and Brew Garden is not your typical restaurant with fancy neon lights or outdoor banners to attract a myriad of customers. Instead, it attracts its customers using a coffee tree and spinach grown on an elevated-improvised tyre garden at the entrance.
The interior is not the run-of-the-mill kind either. There are more mini-gardens planted with spinach, coriander, tree tomato, mint, and pepper throughout the restaurant’s open floor plan.
Its layout ensures that natural light comes in, providing a conducive environment for the plants to thrive and for customers to eat.
The decor is also made out of recycled organic materials such as banana stem leaves, coffee trees, and gravels and stones handpicked from the area.
For example, chairs are made out of coffee sticks with walls covered with banana barks with openings sideways near the roof to let in natural light. The floor is also covered with coarse gravel instead of tiles.
“The idea was to incorporate locally available materials. In Kenya, we have a mentality that for anything to be good it must be very expensive as well as exotic,
“When did we lose our naturality? These are banana fibers that are available everywhere. Who said the floors must be tiled?”
“I designed the whole place step by step.”
As a result, he says he reduced the cost of setting up the restaurant by 60 percent.
The restaurant can accommodate more than 100 customers but with Covid-19’s restrictions that capacity has been reduced to not more than 30.
For customers who are busy to come to eat, the restaurant which currently has two permanent employees and two casuals deliveries within the Kiambu Town for free and to adjacent towns at a fee.
He added that employees will work within five to ten years before being let out to go start their enterprises as well as create space for others.
“I see this as a training ground for the future and I want to change the notion that we need the government to help us.”
Currently, they have two permanent employees and two casuals. “During weekdays, the traffic is little, but on weekends we are very busy.”
His initial investment was Sh100,000 that he used to purchase an oven in 2013.
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