Tough economic times push out legendary restaurant

I had been going to Magomano Restaurant for 20 years.

Located on Tom Mboya Street, across the road from Gill House, the restaurant was better known for its ''muteta soup'' than for its ''githeri special.''

Magomano, which means ''a meeting place'' in Kikuyu, was indeed a meeting place for people of the Kikuyu community, especially from the larger Murang’a County.

If, for example, you wanted to measure the political temperatures of Murang’a County, all you needed to do is hook up with the forum dissecting the county’s politics at the restaurant and you would have a fairly good grasp of the political happenings in the area.

Similarly, if you wanted to understand the city politics, it was the place to go.

Finally, if you were interested in the intricate dynamics of the Jubilee Party from the Kikuyu perspective, Magomano was the joint.

BROUGHT DOWN

The restaurant was finally shut down mid this year, after a successful run of more than 50 years, having been set up in the mid-60s.

When I went there recently, the restaurant was no more, and the space had been partitioned by glass, to be rented out as exhibition shops – a fad that has captured the Nairobi central business district for the last 15 years or so.

The concept of exhibition shops is borrowed mainly from Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Having had my first soup at Magomano in 1998, I had come to know the proprietor and the family, as well as the staff.

''We had to finally close shop after business became too expensive to run,'' said a long-serving waiter.

But the crux of the matter, after 50 years of running the same restaurant, with more or less the same staff, who hailed largely from the same area and serving the same food, the owners knew where the problem lay.

Since Jubilee Party won its second re-election bid in October 26, 2017, the country has been on an economic downturn.

Inflation has shot up, hence disposable income has been dwindling by the day, and people can no longer spend freely on luxuries especially those with cheaper alternatives.

Running a restaurant is a labour-intensive business which must be supported by a constant and consistent supply of clients.

But it is also true that if the clients begin to feel the pinch in their pockets, they would weigh their options, however much they would like to keep coming back.

LAST DAYS

For the 12 months or so before the restaurant went down, it became a place where Kenyans, especially from the Mount Kenya region, would go to grumble and share their frustrations with the country’s political misfortunes and its presidency.

Here, far from the eavesdropping ears of people of other communities, the President would be in for a serious bollocking, torn apart by people who have had no choice but to support his presidency, purely for ethnic reasons.

They would accuse him of being unable to rein in institutional and State corruption, and corrupt state officers.

''President Uhuru has bled the state coffers, as everybody watches,'' said one of the waiters to me. ''He has helped run down businesses by messing the economy.''

Magomano Restaurant was one of the more famous businesses in the CBD run by the ''Rwathia Group'', the business moguls from former Rwathia division in Murang’a district, who for the longest time controlled the economic and political fortunes of Nairobi city.

But now, constantly under threat from new players in economic and political arenas, they seem to be losing their stranglehold on the city’s reins.

But more than anything else, it is the hard economic times that will determine whether they weather the storm or find themselves squeezed into the corner.

Mr Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti