A Local’s Guide to Eating in Cairo, a Culinary Paradise

Most tourists go to Cairo to soak in millennia of history in the shadows of the pharaohs, but it’s hard to ignore the city’s vibrant food scene, which has changed fundamentally since the Arab Spring came to Egypt 13 years ago. Today, it’s a sprawling, sun-baked metropolis of steam-wreathed food carts under gleaming office buildings, merchants selling a rainbow of spices in buzzing, labyrinthine souks, and more and more family-run establishments offering specialty regional cuisines and patio seating by the Nile—all of this a stone’s throw from dusty ancient monuments that have witnessed everything from the invention of beer to the Instagramming of the city’s hippest craft beer bars.

Welcome to Serious Eats’ grand tour of Cairo dining, part of Global Eats, a series of guides to some of the world’s most important and exciting food cities. To inform these lists, we’ve turned to our most valuable assets—the chefs, cookbook authors, and recipe developers who both contribute their cooking expertise to the site and know these cities and their foods better than anyone. For Cairo, we spoke to our resident Egyptian culinary expert, Egyptian food writer and recipe developer Nermine Mansour, who was born and raised in and around Cairo, learning traditional Egyptian recipes under the watchful eye of her grandmother as a child and frequenting beloved Cairene restaurants as an adult student.

Though she now lives in the US, Mansour returns to the City of a Thousand Minarets as often as possible to further inform her recipe writing and culinary knowledge, searching the city’s centuries-old bazaars, food stands, and restaurants for ever deeper insights into her home cuisine. Here, Mansour shares some of her favorite places to eat in Al-Qāhirah, along with her love for the city that turned her into the cook and writer she is today.

Eat Like an Egyptian

It didn’t take long after the overthrow of strongman Hosni Mubarak for the Cairo food scene to change noticeably, Mansour says. First, there was a surge in the energetic street stall vendors lining the roads of downtown Cairo, who have since expanded their operations by adding tables and chairs around their carts. They’ve been joined by other street carts run by new immigrants from around the Middle East—now instead of just  ta’ameya (Egyptian falafel), Cairenes can get Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian falafel at many corners in the city. 

The political transition also opened up a whole new dining scene for sit-down restaurants, including more traditional Egyptian fine-dining establishments, often with chefs who have trained in kitchens all over the world.

”Egypt is a food paradise for Americans and Europeans,” says Mansour. “You can get the best food in the country for almost nothing, and Egypt can cater to any dietary restriction, including vegan, gluten free, meat, seafood, and even keto. You can have a full meal for $1 or $2, and then you have top-tier restaurants where you can eat for $100 or $120. We have amazing sushi and steaks. We have chefs who trained in Tokyo, London, France—there’s no shortage of top-tier chefs.”

But it’s a city that can take some getting used to, especially if you’re coming from the US, she says. “Cairo is a love-it-or-hate-it city,” she says. “It’s loud, rowdy.”

And then there’s the food itself, which has “evolved big time in the last decade since the Arab Spring with the influx of refugees from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine,” she says. Though these nearby cuisines have long had a hand in the evolution of Egyptian food, these new Cairenes have added even more variety and nuance to a rich existing Egyptian cuisine—a cuisine that already has thousands of centuries of Mediterranean, North African, Ottoman, Indian, French, and other influences. In the last decade, what Mansour describes as “hardcore” Egyptian cuisine has taken off as Egyptians found a new sense of pride in their national identity.

Restaurants

Koshary Abou Tarek

16 Marouf, Qasr El Nil, Cairo Governorate 4272135

Egyptian Christians, who make up about 10% of the population, fast around 200 days a year, 55 of them spent adhering to a strict siami (essentially vegan) diet. They and their dietary restrictions have played a huge role in shaping Egyptian cuisine, with one of the most popular siami dishes being koshari. 

Among the places that Mansour went to growing up and as a young adult was Koshary Abou Tarek, which started as a street cart in the mid-20th century and is now a modernized, three-story restaurant in the heart of downtown Cairo. She makes a point of returning at least once a year, and the place was one of the restaurants she had in mind when she developed her own koshari recipe for Serious Eats.

“I grew up eating [at] Abou Tarek because my parents’ apartment was in Downtown and I worked and was taking a Spanish class nearby; the quality has never gone down,” she says. “I’d go once or twice a week—you get a seat and within five minutes you get your dish, and it fills you the rest of the day!”

The chefs at Abou Tarek layer white, square bowls first with rice and lentils, then pasta, chickpeas, and a blanket of tomato sauce before smothering it all in crispy onions and hot and garlicky sauces.

“It’s very easy to get one or more of the ingredients very mushy if the restaurant is not experienced, but they always nail it,” she says. “The crispy onions are just right, not oily, the pasta is a delight, and everything is just perfect.”

Seekh Mashwy Dokki

106 Nile St, Ad Doqi, Dokki, Giza Governorate 3753452

Sometimes a homesick Egyptian just needs a place where they can get all the dishes they’ve been craving while abroad. For Mansour, those dishes include bissara (a bright green fava bean dip), molokhia (a fragrant jute mallow soup), kabab halla (braised beef), and koshari, of course, which she often finds at Seekh Mashwy Dokki, a modern, middle-class restaurant with intricately painted, tile-topped tables that overlook the Nile.

When Mansour was a child, her grandmother made family-sized batches of molokhia, and Mansour vividly remembers the matriarch painstakingly chopping up fresh jute leaves with a mezzaluna and then letting out an audibly loud gasp as she added the garlic-coriander paste to the simmering broth—this gasp is a traditional step that guarantees a tasty molokhia. 

Seekh Mashwy Dokki overlooks the Nile from endless rows of tables along the narrow, green-carpeted deck. She makes a point of taking visitors there to impress them with Cairo’s food scene, like when her husband’s family visited from California.

“We had a foodstravaganza at Seek Mashwy, and the waiters poured the molokhia from a big pan into a clay pot, and everything was perfect,” she says. “The bread was freshly baked, our pita was made with whole wheat and bran with a smoky flavor, the molokhia was freshly made—everything was fresh.”

Tante

Tucano Commercial Complex, Youssef Abbas, St, Nasr City, Cairo Governorate 4434110

Fatta—slow-cooked beef in a garlic-vinegar sauce (and sometimes tomato sauce) over toasted pita and toasted basmati rice—is a dish that serves as the centerpiece of many an Egyptian celebration, and Mansour says it’s deeply tied to her memories of countless festivals and holidays growing up in Egypt.

When she’s back in the country and hankering for fatta without the fuss of making it in a home kitchen, she goes for the next best thing at Tante, a newer but much-lauded place started by Ashraf Abdel Baky, a famous Egyptian comedian. The restaurant attempts to recreate the cozy, friendly feeling of a middle-class Cairo home—though that’s conveyed more through the homestyle menu and convivial staff than the place itself, which has the black leather chairs and round, wooden tables you might expect in a European cafe.

“He’s using the recipes of his aunt [“Tante” means “aunt” in Arabic], and you get the taste of homemade food, a taste of how Egyptians cook, and everything is served in tagines,” says Mansour. “When I don’t have time to cook, and since my mom is older now, I go to this place, not a place where it’s stuffy. It’s convivial, it’s comfortable, and it’s very inviting.”

Desserts

Mandarine Koueider

5 Baghdad St., El Korba, Heliopolis, Cairo Governorate 4460213

Though she was born in Cairo, Mansour’s family moved a couple hours away to the seaside city of Alexandria when she was young. Nevertheless, she always looked forward to the trips back to Cairo because they included a stop at Koueider, a pastry shop that’s an institution in the city.

“My father would make a stop over at Koueider and we would get an assortment of Koueider sweets, so, for me, Koueider means family gatherings,” she says. “Now, every time I go back, the second day I arrive, I get a tray with my favorites—baklava, basbousa. This is the mecca of Egyptian sweets.”

In fact, Mansour credits the place for inspiring her own recipe for basbousa, a dessert she describes as a “miracle” consisting of a “shiny, glazed surface and defined layers of soft semolina cake and thick, creamy ashta [clotted cream] … [w]ith some chopped pistachios on top to add crunch and a complex flavor that’s in turn floral, herbal, and citrusy.” 

“I created my recipe from my taste memory of Koueider,” she says.

The Latest
Basbousa Bel Ashta (Semolina Cake With Ashta Cream Filling)
This version of basbousa is filled with a rich clotted cream and drenched in a rose-scented syrup.

cook time:


6 hrs 50 mins

serves:


8
to 10

Most of Koueider’s locations feature a storefront with a counter where you tell the staff what size box you want and then ask them to fill it with the treats on display—they’re meant to be takeout only, though some of the mall stores have tables and seats.

There are actually two Koueiders in Cairo across the street from each other—one for the pastries and the other for ice creams in traditional flavors like pistachio, mastic, and strawberry. They’re known as booza, Egyptian ”fluffy ice cream, not custard-based ice cream,” she notes, and they are absolutely worth sampling if you’re in the area.

Mansour, however, still goes back to the same blue-and-white-tiled Koueider in Heliopolis, where the founder’s photograph has always hung on the wall as if he’s still watching over the place.

Markets

Khan el-Khalili

El-Gamaleya, El Gamaliya, Cairo Governorate 4331302

No Website

You can’t go to Cairo without experiencing an Egyptian souk, a heady cacophony of hawking and haggling over everything from colorful fabrics to household necessities. And then there are the spice markets, where the whole color spectrum seems to be represented in the mounds of powders and dried plants in plastic tubs arranged in tiers along the front of each seller’s stall. Most are in Old Cairo, but the most picturesque may be Khan el-Khalili, where you can shop for ornate lamps and brass platters under moody Islamic arches and soaring minarets that send out the calls for prayer. 

“If you want a taste of life in Old Cairo, you have to visit the spice market, the gold market, the silver market, and the leather market in Khan el-Khalili in the oldest district in Cairo,” says Mansour. “It’s a cobblestone street, it’s rowdy, it’s loud, it’s crazy, but it’s an incredible mix of alluring senses.” There, the smell of tannins from the leather market mingles with the spice market’s prickly scent of cumin and mastic and the perfume-y fragrance of anise and hibiscus, all as you munch on a steaming, savory kebab from a street cart. “It’s the heart of Cairo,” says Mansour.

Mansour says 90% of the spices in her pantry come from Cairo’s markets, but strongly recommends that you make sure that what you buy and intend to take back to your home country is vacuum-sealed. This way, you won’t have to explain to customs on your return home about any insects that infested your spices.

“If you tell the vendor you’re traveling, they will give you vacuum-sealed packets,” she says. 

Street Food

The city’s street food options have changed since the Arab Spring, according to Mansour. What used to be simple, colorfully painted carts have become bigger carts or stalls that now include tables and chairs in the street where you sit down and wait for your food to be brought to you.

At these places, Mansour likes to order ful medames (stewed fava beans), ta’ameyah (Egyptian falafel), Egyptian-spiced potato chips, and Egyptian-spiced pickles (a popular spice blend in Egypt is dukkah, which is a mixture of sesame, cumin, coriander, black pepper, salt, and pounded hazelnuts). Or she might order shawarma, which has become a huge thing in Cairo street food over the last decade—the Egyptian variant is made with an  onion-juice marinade and is served not in a flatbread but in a brioche roll, a nod to the country’s Greek and Italian influences, she says.

“Egyptian shawarma is amazing, and they make the bread from scratch, and usually it has a lot of tahini, not hummus, which is a Palestinian and Syrian thing,” she says.

Mansour doesn’t have a particular place she goes for shawarma and recommends visitors go out and find their own favorite. “It’s very hard to find a bad shawarma place in Cairo right now because the competition’s so fierce,” she says.

Going the Extra Nile

One final word of advice: If you want to get the full Egyptian food experience, steer clear of the set-lunch tourist traps that come with the Pyramid tours. Instead, take these tips from our resident local, Nermine Mansour, to heart and learn to eat like the Cairenes really do.