I travelled to Rwanda from England, a country slowly getting taken over by a celebrity chef called Jamie Oliver. He is everywhere, blanketing the media with new television shows and cookbooks or just yelling at mothers that they don’t feed their children well enough at school. His recent fame explosion is the result of a project called 15, where he took 15 unemployed teenagers and gave them chef training for free. This developed into a hugely popular television show, which gave the course sufficient funding to continue year after year with new students.

After leaving a country caught up in celebrity chef-fever, the last thing I expected to see in Rwanda was something very similar taking place out of the eye of the media, but that was exactly what I found when I visited Papyrus Restaurant in Kigali. The Italian restaurant owner Fabrizio Autoguelli discovered an absence of good cooking schools in Rwanda and set out to create a course of his own. A course was created with the help of international sponsors to provide demobilised soldiers with a year of culinary education and training in order to provide real job opportunities. The project was a great success, with graduates from the course finding work with NGOs and co-operative restaurants thanks to the skills they had attained.

The course was repeated, offering young and unemployed people in the area the opportunity to compile a skill-set whilst giving them a helping hand towards a definite career path. This all started four years ago and after the second year Papyrus Restaurant was started with the first chef to graduate the course.

When a friend and I sat down for dinner at the Papyrus, I found it hard to believe that this was the restaurant where this great charity project was taking place. In England a place such as this would be a media circus, packed with people who had seen it on television and fought to get a table at the ‘charity’ restaurant that they’d heard so much about. Instead we found a comfortable, welcoming restaurant that was busy, but no more than any other restaurant in the capital.

This is perhaps best thing about the place, as it blends in perfectly with the city, at no time seeming like a gimmick. There is no sense of cynical self-promotion about the place, with no indication of the charity that started the restaurant available unless you were to ask the manager. This is a real restaurant, not a novelty, and it provided us with the best meal of our entire stay in Kigali.

Just as the staff were found in the local area, all of the produce used for the food is local, free of any possible ‘contamination’ that can come with importation. Mr Autoguelli is determined to make real quality Italian food using this local produce, with the menu constantly evolving as new machines and techniques become available. He stressed that ‘appearance is not as important as substance’, but despite this no-nonsense dogma the Papyrus seems to offer both. The food is wonderfully prepared and exquisite tasting.

I had a pasta dish with Roquefort and mushrooms, whilst my friend had a pizza and both were a resounding success, with the portions the perfect size to fill us up, but still offer the irresistible temptation of the dessert. The dessert was a new offering on the menu, a cooked apple with chocolate. It was lovely and also served seemed to represent the restaurant itself, understated, simple, but put together with real care and love until it is just right. The prices were also a pleasant surprise, with main courses less than 10,000 francs and the overall bill plus drinks reaching less than 20,000 a head.

The restaurant itself is really quite eye-catching, with diners lit by candlelight on the large outdoor terrace, and well decorated, spacious bar area that showed signs of more planned expansion, another typical example of the atmosphere of ambition that abounds in the place.

The Papyrus represents a great achievement in every sense. The quality of the food shows how well the training courses are going, but also the overall quality of the restaurant and the whole evening shows that it has transcended its charity roots. Rather than being a place to go to simply because of the interesting work that is being done there, it has become a place to go simply because it offers a great food and a charming evening. And that is an achievement to be proud of.