The Supper Clubs and Pop-Ups Revitalizing Cairo’s Food Scene
- P2A
- Jun 17, 2025
- 5 min read
From pop-ups and farm-to-table lunches to fine-dining supper clubs, a new wave of culinary experiences is hitting the Egyptian capital.
By Nada El Sawy
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.
On the table at NatureWorks, the decor incorporates local flora. Photo: Courtesy NatureWorks | NatureWorks, a hydroponic farm in the Sheikh Zayed suburb, offers lunches. Photo: Courtesy NatureWorks
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.
Irfan Malek, chef and partner of Egyptian-Japanese smokehouse Char in El Gouna, recently put on his second event with NatureWorks. His six-course fine dining menu blended his Malaysian origins with his journey to Egypt. It started with the Borneo citrus-cured seabass, but the two cultures came together in dishes like Thai salad with ringa (smoked herring), a roti canai feteer filled with oxtail, seabream with kimchi risotto, lamb topped with grilled molokhia, and finishing with a date and tahini mousse. “I’m happy that the culinary culture in Egypt has grown very rapidly in the last couple of years,” Malek says. “There are a lot of upcoming new chefs that really stand out among the others. And by having this platform of opening pop-ups here and there, it really gives them a free space to express their art—who they are and what they think of food.”
Makar Farms
Makar Farms, a 145-year-old family-run farm in Giza, has been hosting semi-regular monthly Saturday lunches with local chefs since 2016. Owner Mounir Makar gives an impassioned pre-lunch farm tour, showcasing unusual produce, such as purple broccoli, endive, and several varieties of tomatoes, while his daughters Malak and Farida Makar handle the event planning for the 40-person lunches. “We just like the idea of the farm being accessible in some way,” Malak Makar says. “It’s nice to bring different chefs so that different crowds come to the farm, and also people who come to the farm are exposed to different chefs.”
The atmosphere is casual and family-friendly, with children welcome for half price. At the latest lunch with Syrian expatriate Sima Ajlyakin, food was served mainly buffet-style rather than course-by-course. The dishes included chicken fatteh, samakeh harra (spicy fish), stuffed vine leaves with meat slow-cooked for 10 hours, kibbah, eggplant fattoush, and muhammara (walnut and roasted red pepper dip). Hosting dinner parties is a side hobby for Ajlyakin, a professional photographer who runs her own studio.
Big Belly
Reem Elgohary had a passion for fermenting vegetables and making Asian staple food, such as ramen and kimchi, for friends. They inspired her to launch Big Belly supper club in March 2024, hosting 40 people in places like Ratios Underground, the casual bakery and cafe in Maadi. She now splits her time between Cairo and Lisbon, offering fermentation workshops and dinners served with kombucha drinks.
At a recent Big Belly dinner at Ratios, Elgohary whipped up a seafood-centric meal, staying true to her roots growing up in Hurghada. Sharing plates on the tables included Suez shrimp carpaccio cured over citrus vinegar and fermented gooseberries, charred shishito peppers, and Mediterranean clams with tomato kimchi jus. The main dish was smoked Red Sea cuttlefish served over soba noodles with chilled dashi broth. A refreshing peach, thyme, and citrus sorbet with candied citrus peel sealed the evening. In between courses, Elgohary flitted down the long communal table to chat with customers, many of whom have become friends. “It’s growing in a way that I love. It’s not just the food, it’s the community that comes around it,” she says.
Comida by KEN
Kareem El Nagdy initially shared his pasta-making obsession with friends and on social media. Since 2021, he has hosted his 12-person Comida by KEN supper club in his Maadi apartment. It is an intimate experience and strangers get to know each other while sitting around his dining table. El Nagdy enjoys making Mediterranean food and particularly pasta—think labneh ravioli with a mint butter sauce. Every couple of months, he offers a new supper club season with a seven-course menu for several evening slots. In addition to pasta, he often serves meat-based dishes, such as herb-crusted lamb shanks or smoked beef brisket, with a rich soup, a fresh salad, and a suitably sophisticated dessert. The only product he buys in from abroad is pasta flour, but he says the variety available from local suppliers has improved a lot in the last few years. “Recently there has been a kind of food revolution in Egypt,” El Nagdy says. “Everyone is partaking in this revolution, in one way or another.”
Chef Dina Hosny plates a dish ahead of The Corner Shop's latest dinner series. Photo: YEHIA EL ALAILY | Hosny adjusts the arrangement of a garnish. Photo: YEHIA EL ALAILY
The Corner Shop
One to watch: a former warehouse, garage and Kodak store in downtown Cairo, The Kodak Passageway was transformed into The Corner Shop, a gastronomic destination celebrating Egypt’s culinary culture, for trial runs in February and again in May 2025. The pop-up hosted several dinners with local chefs, including olive oil sommelier Alia El Askalany, Omar Semary of Blak by O, “Cool Cat” Hazem Abdelghany, and most recently, chef Dina Hosny. Stay tuned for news of further iterations, as El Sherif says they hope to make it a permanent fixture in the future.
Read the original article on Condé Nast Traveler.
Comments