What the menu doesn't say

I'm a head chef at a hotel in Mombasa and the menu I write is not the writing I'm here for. The menu says things like 'grilled barracuda with coconut reduction and cassava crisps' and that sentence is accurate and entirely insufficient. I started writing about food properly in 2018, in a notebook I carried to Mombasa Old Town on my days off. Not recipes. More like accounts: what a specific meal at a specific table looked like from the kitchen, what the day was in the city, what the person eating was thinking about, as far as I could tell. The fiction is an extension of that. I write short stories in which food is always present and never the point. A story about a family argument that happens over pilau. A story about a man who eats alone at a good restaurant every Friday and why. I grew up in Nairobi but have been in Mombasa for eight years and the coast has changed what I cook and what I write. The Swahili culinary tradition here is more interesting to me now than anything I learned in catering college in Nairobi. Urojo soup. Mkate wa sinia. The specific way coconut milk is used in this region, which is different from how it's used in Thai cooking and different again from Kerala, and all three conversations are happening simultaneously in my kitchen and in my drafts.