Avec Karim Turns Four Seasons Tea Lounge to Their Tableside Storybook

In the hushed light of Four Seasons Cairo at The First Residence, the Tea Lounge carried its usual air of refinement: polished marble, high-backed chairs, Cairo’s usual cadence of clinking cutlery. And then came the disruption: a lunch hosted by Avec Karim and a preview of the restaurant’s autumn menu.Chef Karim has long been charting Egypt plate by plate. His “Tableside” concept is both retrospective and forward motion, threading together years of expeditions — the foraging trips, the sourcing detours, the quiet hours of research and development — into a menu that reads like a travelogue. It’s a catalogue of memory, each dish pinned to a place, a moment, an encounter.The sequence began in sly understatement: a smoked egg yolk softened by basterma cream and fig leaf syrup, breakfast turned into theatre. It was a kind of opening gesture — humble, domestic — but beneath it, a quiet provocation. What happens when the familiar is reimagined so completely it becomes strange again? From that point, every course built on the last, as if Karim were telling a story in fragments. Each plate pulled from something buried — an old recipe, a fleeting scent, a memory of home — and set it back before us, intact.What began as an exclusive lunch at Four Seasons Cairo at The First Residence became something else entirely: Egypt’s flavours reframed as a journey, one that insists the future of dining lies not only in reinvention, but in the stories the table dares to hold.

For reservations head to: https://aveckarim.odoo.com/appointment/1