Deluxe Trips Egypt

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Downtown Cairo, at the table

Khedival Cairo on foot, at breakfast, lunch or dinner: ful and ta’ameya at a cart, koshari at the counter, liver and hawawshi after dark.

Downtown · Cairo2–3 hours
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A red wooden street cart on a large red wheel. Its load is wrapped in patterned cloth and sacking, steam rises, and a vendor stands behind it.

Downtown, Wust el-Balad, is the city Khedive Ismail commissioned in the 1860s on Parisian lines: broad streets, round squares, stone apartment blocks with high ceilings. It is now a protected Area of Value, and it is still where Cairo eats standing up.

Choose a sitting. Each is a short walk between the places that serve one meal best, eaten the way the city eats it, with the buildings explained on the way. One meal eaten properly, not a dozen bites.

One meal, eaten properly, in the district built to be Cairo’s modern face.

How it could run

A proposed shape, confirmed with you when it is arranged.

  1. Meet at a downtown square agreed in advance.
  2. Walk a few streets, reading the buildings on the way.
  3. Sit down to the meal where it is served best, as its regulars eat it.
  4. Finish with tea at an ahwa, or with something sweet.
On a red tablecloth, a metal bowl of whole beans with a spoon, flatbread on a plate, and a cup of tea.
Breakfast in Cairo, 2017.
Black-and-white photograph of a carved wooden barrow with metal vessels on its counter, a man behind it and veiled women beside it, below a long wall.
A barrow restaurant, Cairo, from Douglas Sladen, Oriental Cairo (1911), via the Travelers in the Middle East Archive.

Arranged on request, around your route.

Tell us when you will be in Downtown · Cairo and we will confirm what is possible before anything is booked.

Pairs well with Khayamiya with the tentmakers, Attar, from the raw material.

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Photos: Shimaa elashmouny88, CC BY-SA 4.0; H. Hakan Atik, CC BY-SA 4.0; Sladen, Oriental Cairo (1911), CC BY-SA 2.5