My friends and I were curious to have our first try of Egyptian food and went here on a Friday evening for dinner.
I made a booking on their online website and received confirmation via email within 24 hours. I had to change my booking to include an additional person and the restaurant was happy to oblige.
We arrived to the sounds of international music, the smell of overpowering shisha from people shisha-ing it outside as we were seated on ornate tables, cushioned benches or wooden chairs.
We were then handed expansive menus with lots and lots of options. There are around 3-4 different salads, a dips platter with pita bread and three different dips, grilled meats, a large vegetarian section, lots of tagines to choose from and some Egyptian dishes.
The menu also contains Egyptian drinks like a tamarind juice, an Egyptian mango juice and an Egyptian guava juice. You can also get coffees and teas. I can't remember if they had alcohol on their menu but then again you can look it up on their friendly website. As the four of us were starving by 8.30pm, we just ordered food.
The waitress recommended that we get the dips platter and the three most popular dishes - the okra lamb tagine, a national grilled chicken dish with soup and rice and a macaroni, lentil, rice and fried onion dish.
It all sounded interesting and novel (except the dips) so we were all excited.
The food arrived very quickly. We had four kinds of pita (well - four kinds as in the normal pita bread, crunchy pita bread, deep fried pita bread so that it resembled chips and was brown, and more deep fried pita bread that looked slightly lighter in colour) with hommus (average-tasting), babaganoush (smoky and the nicest of all dips but i've had better), and tzatziki (very bland).
Then we had the koshari, an Egyptian classic. It is lentils mixed with rice and macaroni, topped with chickpeas, fried onions, and a tomato and garlic sauce. It came with some chilli flakes. Such a weird-carby combo. The lentils mixed with rice tasted very Indian. The chickpeas (boiled) and macaroni (boiled) lacked any flavour (i.e. they were not spiced/flavoured with anything). The tomato and garlic sauce just tasted like tomato paste.
Next, we had the Egyptian national dish which was grilled chicken with buttered/oiled sticky rice and a green herby looking soup with something in it that gave it some slime. So, the way to eat it is to take some rice, pour the slimey green soup on top and then eat it with chicken. The chicken was delicious. The green soup tasted very green with a subtle stock flavour to it. It tasted nice on the rice but my friends didn't like the texture. So, we didn't have much of it.
The okra lamb tagine was very different to tagines (Moroccan) that I've had before. It comes in an Earthen pot (very small and like a ramekin) rather than in a fancy tagine. It was quite hot in temperature. Again, the lamb and okra tagine were drenched in tomato paste/sauce. The tomato flavour was so overwhelming that we didn't really taste anything else. Quite disappointing.
My friends actually thought all the main dishes tasted the same - like tomato paste. I was quite disappointed as I expected unique flavours and didn't get any.
Pros
1. Quick food
2. Great service- friendly and helpful staff
3. They do split bill
4. Affordable - bill came around to $88 in total so $22 per person.
5. Nice ambience. read more