Cairo Food and Travel Guide: Koshary, Ful Medames and Street Eats
Cairo is loud, vast and endlessly alive, a city where the smell of grilling meat and frying chickpeas drifts through ancient lanes. Egyptian food is built for sharing and for stretching a few ingredients a long way, and street stalls here serve some of the most satisfying cheap eats anywhere.
What to Eat in Cairo
The undisputed national dish is koshary, a glorious carbohydrate pile-up of rice, lentils, macaroni and chickpeas topped with spiced tomato sauce, garlicky vinegar and crisp fried onions. It is vegetarian, filling and sold everywhere from hole-in-the-wall counters to dedicated koshary halls.
Breakfast belongs to ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans mashed with oil, lemon and cumin, scooped up with flatbread. Its companion is taameya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans rather than chickpeas, giving it a greener, fluffier interior. For something richer, seek out molokhia, a garlicky green soup made from jute leaves, often served over rice with rabbit or chicken.
- Koshary — rice, lentils, pasta and chickpeas
- Ful medames — stewed fava beans
- Taameya — Egyptian fava-bean falafel
- Molokhia — jute-leaf green soup
- Hawawshi — spiced meat-stuffed bread
Where and How to Eat
The medieval bazaar of Khan el-Khalili is the classic place to combine sightseeing with eating. Between the brass and lantern stalls, duck into a historic café for mint tea and shisha, and find nearby stands grilling kofta and shawarma. The surrounding Islamic Cairo district hides excellent ful and taameya carts favoured by locals.
A practical tip: street koshary is ordered by size, so just say sughayyar (small) or kebir (large) and point. Carry small banknotes, as vendors rarely have change for large bills, and a little haggling is expected in the bazaar but not at food stalls. Menus and handwritten price boards are usually in Arabic script only, so photographing them to translate makes navigating an unfamiliar stall much easier.