Where To Eat In Cairo?

[zora]

I'm headed to Cairo tomorrow for a month, to do research for a travel guide. I used to live there, but now it downs on me that it was ten whole years ago!

So I've got all the usual guides and other references, but I'd appreciate hearing restaurant recommendations from well-traveled food fans such as yourselves...

[Smithy]

I'm headed to Cairo tomorrow for a month, to do research for a travel guide.  I used to live there, but now it downs on me that it was ten whole years ago!

So I've got all the usual guides and other references, but I'd appreciate hearing restaurant recommendations from well-traveled food fans such as yourselves...

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I am very, very fond of Estoril. It's a good sit-down restaurant with an interesting mix of Lebanese and Egyptian food and hilarious English signs; the food is excellent; it's been around for decades. Unfortunately I can't tell you exactly where it is. The address is 12 Talat Harb Street, but you actually get to it by going down an alley first. It's in the general vicinity of downtown Cairo: within easy walking distance of the Cosmopolitan Hotel. The sign outside, when we visited last year, said "... Experience the best + the worse as in Aesop's Fable

Eat unpronouncable and undescribable dishes at the oldest restaurant"

My husband and I are also fond of Khoshary Tahrir, for the best khoshary to be had. It's cheap, it's filling, and it's excellent. My Egyptian teacher informs me that we are "very brave" (translation: extremely foolish) for eating there, and at places like it, because of the increasing incidence in hepatitis C in that country and the appalling lack of sanitation in places like Khoshary Tahrir. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

We're also quite fond of the roasted sweet potatoes you can get from the wagons in the Khan El Khalili. It's hard to see how one could go wrong with those.

My Egyptian teacher loves Hussein's, or is it Hassan's?, near the mosque end of the Khan El Khalili. It's another time-honored establishment.

There's a Lebanese place in the Garden City district that we've always loved, by the name of Tabbouli. The last time we went (2006), it was quite good but not as wonderful as it once had been. Somewhere - probably here - I read that there had been a change in the management, and the original owner had opened a restaurant of the same name in Maadi.

Finally, during our 2005 trip we discovered a place on the river in Maadi that was well worth the visit. Here's what I wrote in this post, from (can it be so long ago?!) 2005: If you're staying in Maadi, the Sofitel there has a nice bunch of restaurants in the hotel, but they're all foreign cuisine (Tex-Mex, Italian, etc.) except for the breakfast buffet upstairs in the morning. (The breakfast buffet caters equally to foreigners and locals, and does justice to all its food.) For other meals, if you wander down the Corniche (river street) about a half mile you'll find a restaurant that's right down on the Nile - for a while I thought it was actually on a barge. Sorry I don't remember its name, but it was a grand discovery last year. Walk down the Corniche until you pass a big plant nursery, then a little farther you'll see a private club, then this restaurant. You have to go down a flight of steps toward the river to get to it.

I have no idea whether that place is still in business, but it would be worthing seeking out. My information about Estoril, Khoshary Tahrir and Tabbouli are as recent as 2006.

Have fun!

[Peter Green]

I was back in Cairo in 2004/2005 on business, having left in 1990.

I tried the restaurant on top of the Hyatt, and was underwhelmed. At least the windows were clean so the view was good. Talking with some of my friends that had moved back there, the Marriott still seemed to have the best F&B.

I tried to get our contractors to order in some felafel for lunch for old times' sakes while we were working through things, and they flat out refused. This was in Heliopolis. They said the last five times they did it, the whole office was out sick.

Estoril? Is that the one where you come off of Tahrir with the Museum on your left, go up about two blocks, and there's an alleyway to your right with a sign hanging out? Cats and rats walking in the ceiling rafters? They always had really good pigeon. I'd go back there! The food was good, and the place was a lot of fun.

For something different, why not try Okamoto's. In 2005 it was still there, tucked away in Mohandessin. No sushi or sashimi (not that I'd trust it in Cairo), just good home kitchen style cooking. Their tonkatsu is excellent, and they had some tripe stews that I haven't seen elsewhere.

Be careful of the Hep C thing, and health in general. Egypt still has the reputation of being the place most likely to get violently sick. But you've lived there before, so you should still have some immunity.

The nice thing about having lived in Cairo is that no other country's bacteria is going to have much of a chance against what you've already got in you.

[Smithy]

The description of Estoril's location sounds more or less right. I don't remember rafters that would support cats, rats or knickknacks, though. That sounds more like Felfelah. That place is in the same general area, and has amazing decor: several rooms, alcoves, uneven flooring, plants and fountains and tilery and doodads in unlikely places, and yes, rafters. I don't recall cats or rats, but it seems possible. The food there is quite good, and that place is well worth checking out for the sake of a travel guide. We like the atmosphere and food at Estoril a bit better.

If you like garlic, be sure to try the thomeyya at Estoril. As I recall it's one of those things you have to ask for because they don't bother to list it. Their fetta shamy is also wildly good. I haven't found too many places in Egypt where I can get fetta at all, and now that I've made it a few times I know why. (I refer to the warm dish with bits of fried broken bread, meat and sauce, in this particular case with chicken and a yogurt sauce. I can't remember whether they have other fettas to offer as well. Some people may pronounce it as fattah.)

My husband says the only time he's been sick from food in Egypt was when he ate from the salad bar at a Pizza Hut ("Bitza Hut") there. His erstwhile boss says the only time he's been sick there was eating a salad at one of the upscale hotels. It doesn't seem that hotels necessarily will have the best or the safest foods.

Oh, and our resident ex-pat friend there often goes to the Greek Club. Same general downtown area but upstairs. Unfortunately, I find it by following my friends.

[zora]

Duh--I only just now remembered I posted this Q. Thanks for all the answers.

I will definitely check out Estoril--it's on my list along with the all the other old-guard joints downtown, and I just didn't know if _any_ were any good these days.

As for Hep C--I know it's a huge problem here, but isn't it blood-borne? I've got my Hep A and B inoculations all up to date, so I'm feeling cocky about the street food issues. Even though I had to take two months of heavy-duty antibiotics last year, which probably knocked out my collection of useful stomach critters.... Hanshuuf ba'a--we'll see.

And good to know about the place in Ma'adi and the Japanese joint--will try to track 'em down.

As for the Greek Club--I know it well! Probably too well. Sooo many rooftop beers, french fries and chicken livers consumed there.

And just putting it out there for future Googlers, though I haven't yet been: the Italian Club is now open to non-Italians--#40 Sh. 26 July. Going there this weekend. Allegedly the best pizza, cheap Chianti, and actual pork products!

Thanks, everybody.

[Peter Green]

Zora!

Pictures (if you can) of the Italian club! And descriptions of the pork products!

I'd always thought the best pork roasts I've ever were in Cairo. I'm not certain if it's the breed of animal, or the fact that they were raised by the zeballi'in in the garbage pits...which happened to be next to the cemetery......

Oh, and I wonder if Mermaid still does their pizza "crispy". Yoonhi ordered one that way when we first arrived in '86, and they gave her a pizza, then crumbled potato chips on top.

Cheers,

Peter

[zora]

Rats--missed any "crispy" pizza options! And no pics of the Italian Club, but let me tell you, it is a great little joint (better be, for LE10 cover!), what with the little red-check tablecloths, and the wine, and the super-crispy pizza, and the grilled veggies and the fact that you could only baaaarely hear the Cairo traffic. (Although, whoa, the place is located on one of the most stressful intersections Downtown--I felt like I might die before I got there, all in the name of some illicit pork. Which was pretty tasty, by the way.)

Other food stuff: the place the cats climb around in is the Greek Club, most likely, where they have the pergola set up on the terrace--I saw a bunch up there, looking hopefully for fish bits. Felfela is still ridiculously decorated, but doesn't seem to have any beasts of any kind inside.

I went to Estoril...and could not get served. It was just a bad day in which my overall exhaustion intersected with typical Egyptian service, which requires the customer be pretty assertive. But it _looks_ like a great place. A local friend confirmed to me that Estoril is renowned for rotten service, and it wasn't just me, sitting all alone and wimpy at the bar and feebly trying to get someone to pay attention to me.

Easily the best meal we had was our last night, when we went to Gomhuriyya, in Bab al-Louq, for stuffed pigeon. That's all they do, basically. And there's nothing in the restaurant but a few tables and a couple of sinks for washing all the grease off when you're done picking the birds apart. They serve the pigeon broth on the side in mugs--it's got little bits of rice and lots of lemon and pepper. Soooo good. But apparently you can only get the soup if you also order pigeon--but then it's all-you-can-drink soup. Such a deal!

Also in that same area--on Midan Falaki--is a big kebab-y joint that specializes in lamb chops. A friend ordered them for delivery one night and they were sooooo good. If you go in the restaurant, it smells like nothing but grilling meat, and you will nearly keel over with desire. I'm spacing the name, but it's on the west end of Midan Falaki, on the south side, and is kind of glitzy-looking compared with surround businesses.

Also ate some surprisingly good Thai food (I suppose the Thai-government-sponsored restaurant promotion abroad is really working)--some at the resto in the Semiramis, which was pricey and very, very hot (rare in Egypt), and some at a place in Zamalek called Sebai Sebai, where some stuff was ho-hum, but it was cheaper and had a nice terrace. I guess most normal people visiting Cairo would not look for Thai food, but I was there for a long time.

I ate at Taboula in Garden City too, and it was so-so. Tomeyya was delish, and a couple other things, but meatballs were leaden and would've made a Lebanese grandmother weep with despair. The place is now owned by the restaurant group that also owns Abou el-Sid and Tabasco and Absolute and so on...so I thought the decor was nifty, but then I went to the other places and saw it was all the same. Cairo is still a small town in a lot of ways.

And my husband claims that Koshari at-Tahrir is actually better than Abu Tarek. Escandalo!

For the record, I only felt mildly queasy one day, which is very good odds for me traveling anywhere, but my husband was laid low for a very long day, and he has a cast-iron stomach. Not sure what he ate, or if it was just overall dehydration, etc. We were fine after that, and even ate more enthusiastically.

More Egypt stories, and maybe food stuff I forgot, on my blog (see link in signature)--click on the "Travails of a Guidebook Author" category. In one of those posts there's a link to my Flickr set for the trip, which has pics of the actual pigs in the zabbalin quarter, one of whose friends I probably ate on a pizza.

Thanks for all the advice!