Welcome to the Neema Crafts Restaurant!

The best place to eat, drink and relax in Iringa. Voted the 'Best British-run Restaurant Overseas in the World' in the Telegraph Newspaper's international 'Best of British' Competition!! (link to http://expatbestofbritish.telegraph.co.uk/restaurant maybe we can include their best of british logo here?)

We pride ourselves on offering fantastic food, snacks and drinks. Our coffee is sourced from one of the top coffee estates in East Africa and prepared using our Italian Coffee machine and grinder set up by the coffee estate especially for their beans, making your espresso, cappuccino, latte or americano second to none! Our delicious range of cakes has a reputation across Tanzania with VSO and Peace corps volunteers making a regular bee-line for the restaurant. Our home made ice cream is also a big hit as are the bacon and avocado paninis! We also serve a delicious range of local dishes such as chips mayai and rice and beans.

Our restaurant is in fact entirely run and staffed by deaf people with one non-deaf physically disabled person on the till. The main reason for starting the restaurant was to showcase the skills of young deaf people to local employers, to show local people how easy communication with deaf people can be, and to change negative attitudes towards them. As well as bringing many people from all sections of society into our centre to see the marvelous things disabled people are doing, the restaurant also challenges people to have to communicate in a different way with their waiter or waitress to place their order. Don't worry it is really easy. Our menus have some basic Kiswahili Sign Language and we provide order sheets for you to write down your order.

We do our best to ensure that all our ingredients are locally sourced and where possible, organically grown. What other restaurant can guarantee that even the sugar, tea and coffee and grown and processed within 4 hours drive of the premises! We aim to support the local market and environment while providing high quality food and drink for you!

As well as the tasty offerings in our menu the restaurant also has a children's play corner, an area of comfy sofa seating to relax with a cup of coffee, WiFi internet access and magnificent views from our balcony seating area. We also have a range of board games available for our customers to play and a tourist information area especially focused on local and cultural tourism opportunities such as guided walks and visits to local families which you won't find elsewhere. For those with an interest in development we also host a library of the latest development journals for our customers to browse and a secondhand book exchange so you can refresh your holiday reading. All this and an internet café in the room next door makes Neema Crafts the place to eat out and you can do so knowing that when you do you make the worlds of many of the disabled people in Iringa a better place!

We are happy to host large groups and tour parties, please do phone ahead and place your order if you are a large group so we can be ready for you and combine your visit with a tour of the workshops while we prepare your food.

Our opening hours are currently Monday to Saturday 9am – 6.30pm but watch this space when we open the guest house when we may start to open in the evenings as well.