Just over a year old and already a Lalitpur institution. The face and culinary brain of La'Soon Restaurant and Vinotheque is forty-something Ghana-native Maria Zimmerman, who runs the restaurant with model-turned-entrepreneur Dolly Gurung.

Maria's a familiar, smiling face to Patansiders for whom La'Soon became something of a lifeline in what was then the dining wasteland of south Kathmandu. But many are still puzzled by one thing: what's a Ghanaian doing running a cult restaurant on Pulchowk?

In 1992, some ten years after she married her Swiss husband, who she met in her hometown Tamale, in northern Ghana, and had moved with him to Kenya and South Africa, Maria decided to give Asia a shot. A decade later, she's glad her children grew up here, her husband continues to build roads with the Swiss Development Corporation, and Maria's travelled all over the country, including going on a two-week trek to Lake Rara, on which she carried champagne. In addition, that is, to being one of the best chefs and most energetic aerobics instructors in town.

The idea for La'Soon came when Maria realised that the massive parties she did every six months for her Nepali and expat friends always got rave reviews, not least for the food. So, in early 2001, she and Dolly decided that this side of the Bagmati needed some stirring up. Maria's love for feeding people until they drop happily away goes back a long time. Back in Tamale, any time bigwigs such as the prime minister, his entire cabinet and entourage visited, she was commandeered to put together a feast of northern Ghanaian food with perennial favourites like the nutty, melon seed-based egussi with meat or fish, palm butter soup, West African-style greens with black-eyed peas, and the polenta-like fufu made of a combination of yam, cassava or plantain. Sometimes, she says shaking her head, there were five or six hundred people.

"After I married Sepp, I started to play with other kinds of food," says Maria. Today, La'Soon hits that spot right between fancy dining and down home comfort food with its Italian-, German-, and American-influenced dishes. Maria is the perfect restaurateur-solicitous, but not overbearing, willing to accommodate diners' tastes, but encouraging them to try new tastes. She's already got regulars habituated to Ghanaian peanut butter soup. Starting next week, there will be a West African chicken stew and some other surprises on the menu, so Kathmandu foodies can come back to life again. Between that and the African and Caribbean nights La'Soon organises, Valley residents finally have a place they can eat truly different food, look at contemporary Nepali art, and dance their hiking boots off.