Egyptian food is peasant cooking that a large city has kept eating. It is heavy on pulses, bread and rice, light on meat, generous with cumin, garlic and coriander, and extremely cheap.
The essentials
Koshary — macaroni, rice and lentils, topped with chickpeas, tomato sauce and fried onions, with garlic-vinegar and chilli on the side. The national dish, entirely vegan, and the subject of its own entry.
Ful medames — fava beans stewed overnight and served with olive oil, lemon, cumin and sometimes egg or tahini. This is breakfast for most of Egypt, sold from distinctive round pots on carts.
Ta’ameya — Egyptian falafel, made from fava beans rather than chickpeas, which makes it greener inside, softer and, most people find, better. Eaten in bread with salad and tahina.
Molokhia — a soup of finely chopped jute leaves, cooked with garlic and coriander, with a viscous texture that visitors either love or find impossible. Served over rice with chicken or rabbit. Worth trying once.
Hamam mahshi — pigeon stuffed with spiced rice or cracked wheat, roasted. A celebration dish and genuinely good, though fiddly to eat.
Fattah — layers of rice, bread and meat with a garlicky tomato-vinegar sauce, eaten at Eid.
Mahshi — vegetables stuffed with rice: courgette, aubergine, vine leaves, cabbage.
Hawawshi — spiced minced meat baked inside bread. Shawarma. Kofta and kebab at a grill house.
Fiteer — a flaky layered pastry, sweet with honey and nuts or savoury with cheese and meat, sometimes called Egyptian pizza.
Bread
Aish baladi — the round wholemeal flatbread — is subsidised and central to Egyptian life to a degree that is hard to overstate. The word aish means both bread and life. Bread price rises have triggered riots more than once.
Sweets
Om Ali, a hot bread-and-milk pudding with nuts and raisins. Basbousa, semolina cake in syrup. Konafa, shredded pastry with cream or nuts, especially at Ramadan. Roz bi laban, rice pudding.
Drinks
Karkade — hibiscus, hot or iced, deep red and slightly sour. Sugarcane juice from the machines with the green stalks stacked beside them, cheap and excellent. Mango, guava and sobia in season. Tea black and very sweet, or Turkish coffee — say mazbout for medium sweet.
Where to eat
Street and canteen is where the good food is. Any koshary shop, ful cart or ta’ameya counter with a queue of Egyptians is reliable.
Felfela in Downtown is the long-established sit-down Egyptian restaurant for visitors. Abou El Sid in Zamalek does traditional cooking in an ornate room. Zooba is the modern take.
Sequoia in Zamalek and the hotel restaurants cover the upper end.
Not getting ill
The usual advice applies and works. Hot, freshly cooked food from a busy place is the safest thing you can eat, whatever it looks like. Be more careful with raw salad, unpeeled fruit, juice from carts left standing, and ice in informal settings.
Do not drink the tap water. Bottled is cheap and everywhere; check the seal.
Most visitors who get ill in Egypt have a mild upset for a day. Take rehydration salts with you.
Ramadan
Almost everything closes during daylight, then the city eats spectacularly from sunset. Iftar in Cairo is worth planning a trip around, and the streets of Islamic Cairo at night during Ramadan are the best they ever are.
Vegetarians
Unusually well served for the region, because so much Egyptian food is pulse-based by default. Koshary, ful, ta’ameya, mahshi and most mezze are vegetarian or vegan without adjustment, and they are the everyday food rather than a special order.
The Coptic fasting calendar means vegan cooking is culturally familiar — during Lent much of the country eats vegan, and restaurants label siyami dishes accordingly.
Meal times
Egyptians eat lunch late, from around two or three, and dinner very late, from nine or ten. Street food runs continuously.
Restaurants aimed at visitors keep earlier hours. If you turn up at a neighbourhood place at seven, you may be the only person there.
Alcohol
Legal and restricted to licensed premises and shops. Stella is the local beer. Egyptian wine exists; expectations should be moderate. Drinking is discreet and largely confined to hotels, Downtown’s old bars and Zamalek.
Nothing is served during Ramadan daylight, and some venues close for the month entirely.
Where the good coffee is
Egyptian coffee culture is the ahwa — the pavement coffeehouse with plastic chairs, tea, shisha and backgammon — rather than the espresso bar. That said, a specialty scene has grown in Zamalek, Maadi and Downtown over the last decade, and there are now several good roasters.
If what you want is the institution rather than the flat white, sit at any ahwa, order shai or ahwa mazbout, and stay an hour. It will cost almost nothing.