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The Supper Clubs and Pop-Ups Revitalizing Cairo’s Food Scene
It’s a weekday night in May in downtown Cairo and chef Dina Hosny is pulling together a seven-course meal in a makeshift kitchen. The Kodak Passageway, once a warehouse, garage, and Kodak store, has been transformed into The Corner Shop, a two-week pop-up celebrating Egypt’s culinary culture. 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 local ingredients at the fore whenever possible.
Cairo’s food scene has seen a surge in such events, from pop-ups and farm-to-table lunches to fine-dining supper clubs, offering diverse and innovative alternatives to the capital’s more mainstream restaurants. The chefs span from self-taught to culinary school alumni, and the food is Egyptian, international or a blend of both, while the venues are similarly varied, encompassing homes, restaurants, and outdoor spaces, to art galleries and, even, clothing shops. “It’s going wild. Everyone’s doing it,” Hosny says. “I think it’s great that people are looking for new experiences.”
Kodak Passageway is an initiative by Flavour Republic, the mastermind behind the annual Cairo Food Week, which will take place for the third time in September. Hoda El Sherif, the founder of the event, says the post-COVID era has fundamentally reshaped the city’s dining landscape. Diners “craved more intimate and immersive experiences,” she says, while “a new generation of chefs—eager to carve out their identity and bypass the traditional barriers of the industry— embraced the model as a launch pad for their careers.”
This sense of experimentation is exciting, especially for Cairo, where the culinary scene is not known for eagerly embracing the new. Another pop-up chef, Kareem El Nagdy, who hosts his 12-person Comida by Ken supper club in his Maadi apartment goes so far as to call the trend a “kind of food revolution in Egypt.” If you’re hungry for something new, here are Cairo’s best new culinary experiences to have on your radar.
NatureWorks
NatureWorks, a hydroponic farm in the Sheikh Zayed suburb, offers a true farm-to-table experience using its homegrown products such as leafy greens and edible flowers. Founded in 2017, the farm has been putting on its pop-up lunches and dinners for the past four years. The first event with New Zealand-born Egyptian-Chinese celebrity chef Bobby Chinn was hugely popular. Since then, NatureWorks has collaborated with Italian chef Giorgio Diana, Peruvian Martin Rodriguez of Izakaya Cairo, physician-turned-chef Wesam Masoud and Khufu’s executive chef Mostafa Seif, among others.
