Family day out at Casino Malindi

By Tony Mochama

Casinos and chill outs sound like the ultimate oxymoron. I mean, it is hard to imagine someone is chilling out when money is being held to ransom by various games of chance such as the dance of the spin machine, the whirring of the roulette table, the sound of your money going down an elegant drain.

Yet Casino Malindi may possibly be the only casino in the land where entire families from gray-haired grandmas to young men in their legal 20s spend their Saturday nights together having fun. Here, they freely gamble and gambol as they sample the gamut of games, from the ringing sevens to gin-rummy, as some sip on gin and rum and softer drinks.

The ‘Casino Malindi’ experience starts on the main thoroughfare of Malindi. It is the most advertised establishment in that neck of the sands. When a patron gets in, there is a red carpet and a doorman at the end of the carpet, and if you are a real high flyer, then a man nicknamed Action Jackson will have arranged for you to be picked up by a four wheel drive and, if you are in a group, by a tourist van.

Inside the casino, no cameras or notebooks are allowed to avoid privacy invasions or number cheats with patterns. However, graceful Beatrice will welcome you, if you could be so lucky.

Before one hits the high-stakes tables, they may want to sample chef Michele Amadei’s dry steaks at the restaurant table, the best in town.

Roller-coaster ride

To get the more hardcore casino experience with the money-funny Italians and cool Casino natives, I went there on a Friday. I chose to be an observer rather than a player of the various games on offer. I like to say it is because I am rational and don’t believe in luck but hard work. Truth is, I’m just a Casino coward.

I did note that even when non-winners left less butch and less rich, they still had a formidable exhilaration about them. So, could it be that at Casino Malindi, rather than a ‘riches-or-ruins’ scenario, it is designed as a fortune roller-coaster ride for the whole family, making it a ‘chill out’ rather than a high blood pressure pleasure?

Unlike many other casino junkets I’ve experienced, here the sense of icy scarred card sharpers and scared amateurs is not there, although older housewives with jackpot thrill and high rollers going for the kill are everywhere. The emotions are, paradoxically, both taut and relaxed but certainly as metronomic as the rhythmical tapping of a glockenspiel. Certainly, all casinos have a certain spell for their gamers, but Casino Malindi does not. One feels they are just having fun and once felled, can leave at leisure. Maybe it is the influence of easy Miami marketing diva Daniella, or her dad Bob Cellini with his easy-going, voluble nature that lends to Casino Malindi’s ambience.

If casinos are prisons for some gamblers, then Casino Malindi would be a carpeted cell filled with cellos where the hellos are warm and the goodbyes only temporary, as in "see you next weekend".