More and more gourmet chefs are orienting their menus around street food. Take the elegant Soi Restaurant at dusitD2 Hotel in Nairobi, where Thai street food is served with panache. It’s with great awe that I speak of street food.

Soi literally translates as street food. The Nairobi culinary circuit is being treated to a menu that’s daringly different — New Delhi Meets Bangkok. Two master chefs, Nishant Kumar Choubey, executive chef from Dusit Devrana New Delhi, and Pairote Pimswat, chef de cuisine at Soi Restaurant dusitD2 are developing an Indian-Thai menu.

The “daringly different” menu for the “pop-up” appearance of chef Choubey in Nairobi and chef Pimswat has eight starters, a choice of four soups, five stir-fries, six curries, six rice and noodle dishes and four desserts.

According to Choubey, it is not fusion cooking but “new world cuisine.” The young chef, who has cooked on every continent in the world, said he loves the fresh greens from Kenya’s local markets, which inspired the stir-fried Kashmiri sukuma wiki. “When I travel, I want my food to progress,” he says.

I started with the inevitable paneer, a common Indian cheese that is pretty tasteless on its own, but the chefs give it a zesty flavour with orange and bird’s eye chilli marmalade, establishing a Thai connection. I loved the sriracha-rubbed paneer brochettes.

The menu is complemented with wines ranging from the wine house to the Rose D’Anjou, France 2013, which went well with the grilled meats and salads.

The chickpea and pumpkin soup with lemon grass skewered lychees was delicious.

Kenyan sukuma wiki makes an appearance on this one-of-a-kind menu as stir fried Kashmiri sukuma wiki with garlic and black bean sauce.

The crispy fried tilapia with sweet and sour pineapple is a safe bet – but if your taste buds lean more to lighter seafish, go for the prawn jalfrazzi with pepper, baby spinach, masala and fresh coconut.

Of the curries, I loved the red snapper green curry with Thai mash and tangy tamarind sauce.

Kenyans will be more familiar with the Makhmali butter chicken with coconut in a silky, spicy sauce accompanied by roti made from maize and wholemeal flour.

On the rice and noodles, I found the pulled jackfruit and caramelised onion biryani delicious. Jackfruits are common in coastal areas of the Indian Ocean.

On desserts, the Thai custard and fresh coconut pudding with yellow lentil dumplings was unexpectedly sumptuous.