The Fayoum is a depression fed by a canal off the Nile, and one of the first places in Egypt with evidence of farming. On the north shore of its lake, Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardner found pits lined with basketry in the 1920s: granaries from the middle of the fifth millennium BC, some still holding emmer wheat and barley.
What grows there now is not a menu concept; it is what the water and the season allow. You spend the morning on that, and then you eat it. The gap between those two facts is the whole experience.
The field decides the menu, not the other way round.
How it could run
A proposed shape, confirmed with you when it is arranged.
- Walk a farm with the person who works it, in whatever the season allows.
- Pick, pull or gather what lunch will be made from.
- Cook it in the farm’s kitchen, doing whatever the cook welcomes.
- Eat at the edge of the field.