At Cairo Food Week, King’s Feast Turns Dinner into Theatre

Last night, the Grand Egyptian Museum staged a feast that set the tone for Cairo Food Week. King’s Feast, curated by Alchemy Experience, was both dinner and theatre, a performance of taste and craft.

Egyptian staples were lifted from kitchen tables and recast as something uncanny: unrecognisable yet rooted in memory. “Each detail is part of the storytelling, woven together to create an experience that feels whole, memorable, and true to what King’s Feast stands for,” explains Alchemy Experience’s Nada ABdel Rahman.

A bar poured its offerings in clay cups, while the amuse-bouche arrived as bolti tartare, delicately balanced on miniature pottery plates. Tradition was reimagined, polished, and reframed as something almost editorial, a tableau of heritage dressed for the spotlight.

At its centre ran a makeshift Nile, a table carved in Egypt’s image, inspired by Jirian Palm Hills. Here the theme revealed itself: “Between Two Banks.” To the East, fruit gleamed with the polish of a fashion editorial; to the West, jars of pickled abundance, fermented and fierce. Together, they paid tribute to the Nile as both a life source and a custodian of Egypt’s culinary past.

“To capture the Nile in a single evening would do it no justice,” Donya Raslan, Designer at Alchemy Experience tells SceneEats, “We sought instead to offer our guests a glimpse of its sanctity and boundlessness, creating a night where they could be carried between its banks and have their senses stirred along the journey.”

The King’s Feast leaned into the chaos of communion, the beautiful mess of gathering at a shared table. Hundreds from Egypt’s food and design worlds circled what was at once dinner and installation. Every fig, every grape was an adornment, a living portrait of culture.

The drinks, by Hummingbird, carried the theme with equal flair. The Riverbank blended vodka with cherry blossom, hibiscus, ginger, and local lime. The Jirian, quickly a favourite, folded fermented guava, clarified basil purée, and lime, a mix as layered as it was smooth served in little clay shots. Then there was When the Nile Rises, tequila cut with roasted sweet potato, cumin salt, and a dusting of capsicum - strange, and impossible to ignore.

When the cue for the buffet-installation was announced, hundreds gathered around a Nile that stretched through the heart of the Grand Egyptian Museum, a table as grand as its backdrop. Designed by Sage, the King’s Feast food display felt like a dissection of both ingredient and culture. There was roumi cheese mousse on feteer meshaltet crisps, herring bruschetta on buttered bread, pigeon confit with grapes over mille-feuille, mastic beef tataki with lamoon me’asfara, and more, a table that mirrored the Nile: abundant and layered.

Dessert, by KB’s Studio, came as a sculpted trio: golden sandstone dates, cocoa-glazed figs, and cocoa-stuffed dates. Each dish read like a cultural experiment, pushing at the edges of Egyptian cuisine, testing not only what it is, but what it might yet become.