Palm Hills is bringing Cairo Food Week into its developments once again, hosting a series of intimate chef takeovers across several of its West Cairo restaurants. The partnership is built around an idea that has increasingly shaped both the festival and Palm Hills’ approach to its communities - that restaurants can offer more than convenience, becoming places where history, culture and everyday life meet.

Food lends itself naturally to that conversation. It can be a hurried necessity between meetings, a carefully measured act of self-discipline, a family recipe whose quantities exist only in muscle memory, or a Friday lunch that tastes, for reasons no menu could adequately explain, exactly like home. Every meal carries something of the conditions that produced it.

Now in its fourth edition, Cairo Food Week builds its programme around these connections. From September 24th to October 4th, international chefs will enter Cairo kitchens to work with local teams, ingredients and contexts, while dinners, exhibitions, conversations and takeovers examine how food acquires meaning - and what it can reveal about the people eating it.

At Palm Hills, this wider story unfolds across Izakaya, Scalini and Mamina’s. Each restaurant will host a distinct culinary perspective, bringing its own relationship with place, ingredients and the idea of a meal into the festival. Together, the takeovers place dining within the broader cultural life of Palm Hills’ developments, rather than treating it simply as another residential amenity.

To book a spot head to cairofoodweek.com.

Gabriella Chamorro Brings Central America to Izakaya

Wednesday, September 30th

At Izakaya, Nicaraguan chef Gabriela Chamorro brings a career shaped by travel, memory and a determination to put Central American cuisine on the global dining map. After 13 years as Emirates cabin crew, she trained at the Culinary Institute of Barcelona and MAD Academy, with stages at Copenhagen’s Geranium and London’s KOL. She later launched intimate supper clubs from her Dubai apartment, which grew into Girl & the Goose, now recognised among the region’s notable restaurants.

Larry Jayasekara Makes Provenance Part of the Plate at Scalini

Thursday, October 1st

At Scalini, Sri Lankan chef Larry Jayasekara brings the weight of a career spent in some of Britain and France’s most exacting kitchens. After training under chefs including Marcus Wareing, Alain Roux, Michel Bras and Raymond Blanc, Jayasekara went on to become head chef at Pétrus, where he won the Craft Guild of Chefs National Chef of the Year in 2016. He later opened his own Mayfair restaurant, The Cocochine, in 2024, building its cuisine around refined modern cooking, old-school hospitality and an unusually close relationship with its produce.

Bo Bech Opens Up the Kitchen at Mamina’s

Wednesday, September 30th

At Mamina’s, Copenhagen chef and restaurateur Bo Bech brings with him a career that has helped shape contemporary Danish dining across three decades. From kitchens including Arpège, Lucas Carton and Le Gavroche to his own Michelin-starred Paustian, followed by Geist and, today, Bobe, Bech has built a culinary language around precision, restraint and a willingness to let an ingredient speak without unnecessary ornament.

Palm Hills will host three distinct culinary points of view, each with its own history and way of understanding what belongs on a plate. The appeal is, of course, in what eventually arrives on the table. But there is something to be said for seeing the hands, histories and ideas behind it too.

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