It’s a weekday night time in May in downtown Cairo and chef Dina Hosny is pulling collectively a seven-course meal in a makeshift kitchen. The Kodak Passageway, as soon as a warehouse, storage, and Kodak retailer, has been remodeled into The Corner Shop, a two-week pop-up celebrating Egypt’s culinary tradition. Hosny, who has a diploma from Le Cordon Bleu London, is serving up duck with kumquat doum jus, smoked aubergine areesh ravioli with roumy cream, and a dessert of date paste kahk pie with shay be laban (tea with milk) gelato and hibiscus syrup. Innovation is the order of the day, with native components on the fore at any time when attainable.
Cairo’s meals scene has seen a surge in such occasions, from pop-ups and farm-to-table lunches to fine-dining supper golf equipment, providing various and progressive options to the capital’s extra mainstream eating places. The cooks span from self-taught to culinary college alumni, and the meals is Egyptian, worldwide or a mix of each, whereas the venues are equally assorted, encompassing properties, restaurants, and out of doors areas, to artwork galleries and, even, clothes retailers. “It’s going wild. Everybody’s doing it,” Hosny says. “I feel it’s nice that persons are in search of new experiences.”
Kodak Passageway is an initiative by Flavour Republic, the mastermind behind the annual Cairo Meals Week, which can happen for the third time in September. Hoda El Sherif, the founding father of the occasion, says the post-COVID period has essentially reshaped the town’s eating panorama. Diners “craved extra intimate and immersive experiences,” she says, whereas “a brand new era of cooks—desirous to carve out their id and bypass the standard limitations of the trade— embraced the mannequin as a launch pad for his or her careers.”
This sense of experimentation is thrilling, particularly for Cairo, the place the culinary scene shouldn’t be recognized for eagerly embracing the brand new. One other pop-up chef, Kareem El Nagdy, who hosts his 12-person Comida by Ken supper membership in his Maadi residence goes as far as to name the development a “form of meals revolution in Egypt.” In case you’re hungry for one thing new, listed here are Cairo’s finest new culinary experiences to have in your radar.
NatureWorks
NatureWorks, a hydroponic farm within the Sheikh Zayed suburb, gives a real farm-to-table expertise utilizing its homegrown merchandise corresponding to leafy greens and edible flowers. Based in 2017, the farm has been placing on its pop-up lunches and dinners for the previous 4 years. The primary occasion with New Zealand-born Egyptian-Chinese language celeb chef Bobby Chinn was vastly standard. Since then, NatureWorks has collaborated with Italian chef Giorgio Diana, Peruvian Martin Rodriguez of Izakaya Cairo, physician-turned-chef Wesam Masoud and Khufu’s govt chef Mostafa Seif, amongst others.
