For the first time in the history of international food and wine, a Kenyan restaurant has been named among the best in the world by one of the world's leading magazines.

The important recognition went to Cultiva, the well-known restaurant that makes sustainable creativity its flag, and where above all quality, taste and innovation go hand in hand, thanks to a young and promising chef, the Ecuadorian Ariel Moscardi. The prestigious magazine 'Food & Wine', the world's foremost authority on food and wine criticism, has included Cultiva in its ranking of the 20 restaurants of the moment, with the following motivation: 'Cultiva is a rustic haute cuisine restaurant that was born as a pop-up during the safari season.

Taking the farm-to-table ethos to the letter, the restaurant is attached to Cultiva Farm in Nairobi's Karen district and serves artfully presented dishes with fresh, organic ingredients freshly picked from the earth'.

We, who have known it since its inception, confirm, and describe it: it is a 'greenhouse' in the green oasis of Karen, one of the areas of Nairobi most associated with creativity and the farm concept. On a piece of land that until a few years ago was home only to greenhouses and sheds, Moscardi, with his partner Peter Sylvester, who owns the location, and a group of young professionals, has set up something more than a restaurant and more like a philosophy of life.

Vegetables, smells and even edible flowers come to the table from the gardens and between the kitchen and open workshops almost all the food on the menu is handcrafted, with the addition of fresh fish for the famous South American 'ceviche' and imported buffalo mozzarella.

Great attention is paid to the presentation of the dishes, to cocktails including imaginative non-alcoholic ones, to organic wine and many other pleasures in an environment that already makes you feel good.

Sustainability is an often abused word, but in the various souls of the Kenyan capital it is a tangible concept that can make a good impression and succeed even alongside the giants of safe investment, of concrete as far as the eye can see, of 'non-places' as the anthropologist Marc Augé called them, with even minimal investment.

An unsustainable non-place is the wasteful shopping mall, which stands as the only drift for the emerging and floating class of urban Kenyans; an entirely unsustainable non-place is the slum, which represents the opposite pole but at the same time is the easiest, most convenient drift for the losers, petty crime and mafias who profit from it and then find themselves enjoying it in the mall.

Cultiva is instead, and fortunately, a Place with a capital P, the kind that can also create a following and a new 'way' of imagining the food and wine proposal in an ever-changing city like Nairobi. And just as fortunately, we were not the only ones to realise this, who two years ago, when it was known by a few enthusiasts, produced the report that you can see below (commentary in italian).