Koshary Abou Tarek, Downtown Cairo
Koshary — a carb-on-carb triumph of rice, lentils, macaroni, chickpeas, crispy fried onions and spiced tomato sauce — is Egypt's definitive street food, and the four-storey temple to it on Maarouf Street in downtown Cairo is the undisputed pilgrimage site. Abou Tarek has been serving the same recipe since 1950 and on a busy Friday can plate up over 10,000 portions in a single day.
The Bowl & How to Eat It
Order by size — small, medium or large — and your bowl arrives already layered in the kitchen: rice and lentils on the bottom, macaroni next, then chickpeas, a ladle of garlicky tomato-chilli sauce (daqqa) and a crown of impossibly crunchy fried onions. On each table sit bottles of extra daqqa, white vinegar and a fiery red shatta chilli sauce; locals douse liberally with all three.
A large bowl costs around LE 40 (roughly USD 0.80) and is genuinely filling. The restaurant is self-service on the ground floor for takeaway or table service on the upper floors; the second floor tends to be quieter and has air conditioning.
The Wider Koshary Scene
Koshary Abou Tarek is the most famous but not the only great bowl in Cairo. Koshary El-Tahrir near Tahrir Square draws loyal locals who swear its sauce is tangier, and the tiny koshary cart outside the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square serves a solid version for LE 20 that you eat standing up — a genuinely local experience at the city's most famous address.
If you want to understand the dish more deeply, the lentils used are small brown masoor lentils, the pasta is a short elbow macaroni, and the tomato sauce is always cooked with cumin and coriander — variations in these ratios are what koshary connoisseurs argue about endlessly in Cairo.
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