Cairo Food Week Brings the World’s Most Acclaimed Chefs to the Capital

Cairo has staged feasts before. Pharaohs dined in chambers lined with gold, foreign dignitaries were entertained beneath stone colossi, and banquets stretched deep into the desert night. From September 25th to October 4rth, the city will stage something else entirely: the third edition of Cairo Food Week, a contemporary festival that has quickly become one of the most ambitious gatherings on the global culinary calendar.

Launched in 2023 by Hoda El-Sherif and Sherif Tamim of Flavor Republic, it began as an audacious experiment - could Cairo summon the world’s most celebrated chefs and place itself squarely on the map of international gastronomy? By its second year, the answer was emphatic. A king’s banquet unfolded beneath Ramesses II at the Grand Egyptian Museum, torchlit tables were set against the Pyramids of Giza, a farm-to-table dinner appeared among desert palms, and downtown, a night market throbbed with spice, smoke and sound. Each meal folded history into the present, showing not only what food here could taste like, but what it could mean with international chefs working hand-in-hand with local talent to create experiences rooted in collaboration with Cairo’s own community.

This year, the festival raises the stakes. Over eleven days, chefs from Amman, Athens, Florence, Dubai and Casablanca will collaborate with their Egyptian counterparts to redraw the city’s culinary map. What they bring - Michelin-honed precision, heritage-driven imagination and the quicksilver inventiveness of street cooking - will test Cairo’s palate, and in the process, its sense of what dining here can be.