Food & Drinks

New Pallet Cafe, an escape in corona times

pallet

Great ambience at Pallet Café. PHOTO | KAREN MURIUKI | NMG

Everybody is walking. Or running. Or cycling. Droves of humans, running away from sitting in the house. Some run away from children. Others from their spouses. Yet, some from themselves — and the voices in their heads.

If you go to Karura Forest and you are done with your 12km run or 20km cycle and you want to sit down for an hour and just decompress before you go back home to help with online learning, go to Pallet Cafe next door.

They have opened a second branch at the New Muthaiga Mall. In case you are trying to remember where you heard this name, Pallet, it is opposite Lavington Mall, the place that only employs waiters with hearing disability. Or is it impaired hearing?

The new Pallet Cafe is open now. You can have a meal and a drink. I think. They have draft beers. The ambience is still rustic and features wooden pallets and an old motorbike nailed to the wall.

Pallet Cafe mirrors the owner's persona — a lanky outdoorsy fella with long hair, a motorbike-riding, start-a-fire-with-two-sticks, camping, marathon-running, forest-y, football junkie type.

Space overlooks the food court. If you go on a Saturday, there is a farmer's market with people sitting at tables, blinking disbelievingly at being able to come out and sit and have a meal after so long in quarantine.

People who go to Pallet Cafe love dogs and tortoises. (There is a resident tortoise at the Lavington branch, still closed. I wonder how that spoiled tortoise is doing.) There will be dogs tethered a few paces away, tongues out.

Children run around. There is a bench out in the garden and one table in the sun. Humans sit there, eating salmon or burgers or drinking beer feeling lucky to be out in the sun, to be alive.

When you look at the customers at Pallet Cafe you realise how much we missed restaurants. And maybe how little we don't deserve restaurants.