Culinary Adventures in Cairo: 4 Essential Eats

Cairo Cuisine

Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is not only a treasure trove of historical and cultural heritage, but also the best place to explore Egyptian cuisine if you're interested in it. Cairo boasts an abundance of street food, offering a variety of Egyptian dishes and classic Middle Eastern cuisine.

For foreigners, Cairo is also the easiest place to order food, with many snack shops providing English menus. Moreover, if you are used to services like Uber Eats, Cairo has a similar delivery app called Talabet. You can register for an account with an Egyptian phone number, and it has an English interface and accepts foreign credit cards, making it very convenient. Although there is a delivery service fee, the prices of many local snacks are relatively cheap. During our few days in Cairo, we mostly used this delivery service. Here are some of the snacks we found quite good.

Kazaz

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Price: $

Kazaz is a well-known snack shop located in downtown Cairo, offering a wide variety of dishes and is very popular among locals. We ate there twice. The first time was on our first day in Cairo. We ordered the fried chicken set meal strongly recommended by the hotel front desk staff, along with a bowl of lentil soup and side dishes of rice and French fries, all for just 222 Egyptian pounds. It was cheap and filling.

Because the taste was really good, a few days later we ordered from them again via the delivery app. This time, we wanted to try more traditional Egyptian food, so we ordered a small shawarma, a Hawashi (a traditional Egyptian snack with meat filling inside bread), and a bowl of lentil soup. All were quite delicious. Especially the Hawashi, which had a street food flavor that suited my East Asian palate very well.

El Tahrir Koshary

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Price: $

This is the most popular Koshary restaurant located in Tahrir Square. Koshary is a true Egyptian dish, consisting of rice, Italian pasta, noodles, chickpeas, tomato sauce, garlic sauce, and crispy onions mixed together. It's very starchy and extremely filling. We ordered two small bowls, each for 33 Egyptian pounds, and it took the two of us three meals to finish. If you want to eat economically, this place will definitely satisfy you. Even the bottled water is cheap. Usually, a bottle of water sold to tourists costs 50-60 Egyptian pounds, but here it's just 5 Egyptian pounds for a small bottle and 10 Egyptian pounds for a large one.

Hadramot El-Manial

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Price: $$

Hadramot El-Manial is a restaurant specializing in grilled meats and traditional Egyptian dishes. The grilled lamb and chicken are very popular, with tender meat. We ordered a grilled chicken, grilled lamb meatballs, and a bowl of bird's tongue soup. Bird's tongue soup is a popular dish in the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, mainly made with a type of small pasta called orzo, which resembles bird tongues in shape and size. The broth is usually chicken or vegetable-based, and it tastes light and delicious.

Al Hamra St

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Price: $$

Al Hamra St is known for its Lebanese-style shawarma. We rarely wanted to dine in, but it was so crowded that we couldn't find a seat, so we ended up taking out. We ordered chicken and sausage shawarma, which had rich flavors, juicy meat, and perfectly baked bread, highly recommended.

Further reading

• More Egypt posts
• More Cairo posts