Bo Bech Goes “Egyptian Here and There” at Mamina’s for Cairo Food Week

As guests arrived at Mamina’s in Palm Hills, Cairo Food Week was putting one of the central ideas of its fourth edition into practice - hand an Egyptian kitchen to a visiting chef, but don’t let him simply reproduce the restaurant he left at home. Across the ten-day programme, international chefs have been stepping into Cairo restaurants to work with unfamiliar teams, ingredients and contexts; at Palm Central, where Palm Hills returned as CFW’s West District Partner, Mamina’s drew Copenhagen chef Bo Bech.

There was some precedent for the experiment. Palm Hills’ restaurants have become recurring stops on the Cairo Food Week map, with visiting chefs working through Scalini, Izakaya, Olivo, Galambo and, in previous editions, Mamina’s itself. This year, the restaurant joined Scalini and Izakaya in hosting three distinct international chefs across Palm Central, placing Bech alongside Sri Lankan chef Larry Jayasekara of Mayfair’s The Cocochine and Nicaraguan chef Gabriela Chamorro of Dubai’s Girl & the Goose.Inside Mamina’s, however, the larger machinery of the week quickly gave way to the particular disorder of dinner. Bech steadily prepared the meal, seemingly unfazed as guests filled the restaurant’s Parisian-like interior, its candlelit tables arranged beneath rose-painted ceilings and centrepieces of red anthuriums. People lingered from table to table, greeting old friends or making new ones, while servers rushed to manoeuvre chairs as groups of ten—or occasionally more—decided they would rather sit together.

The kitchen continued to buzz behind them as its temporary new maestro worked with diligence. Bech arranged the salads himself, placing molokhia leaves on a bed of kale and spinach while simultaneously conducting a kitchen he had only just met. Of course, that wasn't quite as effortless as it appeared. “You have eyes and then all of a sudden you don’t have eyes,” Bech explained of entering an unfamiliar kitchen. “Everything is new…it’s like working in a new ecosystem.”

That unfamiliarity was precisely what Cairo Food Week had engineered. Rather than transplanting a famous restaurant wholesale into Cairo, its visiting-chef programme puts different culinary vocabularies onto the same pass. Bech described the resulting menu as “Egyptian here and there”: a partnership between his own instincts and dishes familiar to the Mamina’s kitchen. There were cheese sandwiches with creamy halloumi, which Bech himself swirled onto rows of crisp crackers as sous chefs watched studiously, alongside raw shrimp, okra and braised short ribs tender to the bone.

Bech’s comfort with disruption predates Cairo. A native of Denmark, he discovered cooking while serving as a UN peacekeeper in Yugoslavia, finding in preparing meals a satisfaction that military life did not provide. He would go on to work in some of Europe’s most exacting kitchens before opening restaurants of his own in Copenhagen, including the Michelin-starred Paustian, followed by Geist and, today, Bobe.

Which perhaps explains why, when Cairo Food Week invited him to Egypt, Bech decided he needed remarkably little from Copenhagen. He brought no private arsenal of familiar ingredients or equipment. “I only brought my heart and my brain,” he said. For Bech, travelling somewhere to cook only becomes interesting if the chef is willing to explore the cuisine already there.

The following day, he planned to wander Cairo’s food markets alone, deliberately distancing himself from the tourist itinerary. It was another version of the blindness he had described in the kitchen: surrendering the expertise that comes from knowing where everything is and allowing a city to temporarily rearrange your instincts. At Mamina’s, that meant working with ingredients, tools and cooks that had not belonged to him before Cairo Food Week put them in the same room.

Before the final course, guests wandered leisurely through the restaurant, continuing conversations, posing for photographs and escaping to the bar for another glass of Chateau Byblos, a slightly sweet Lebanese white wine poured throughout the four-course meal. Bech remained in the kitchen, methodically torching pans of sugared bread until their surfaces reached a deep golden brown.

Soon, servers carried the caramelised bread into the dining room and spoons began breaking through its surface. Only after the last tray had left the kitchen did Bech finally sit down, peering curiously through the doorway at the room he had spent the evening feeding.

A few hours earlier, he had described arriving in a new kitchen as suddenly losing your eyes. This was, in miniature, the experiment Cairo Food Week has been staging across the city: not importing Copenhagen—or London, Dubai, Venice—into Cairo intact, but seeing what happens when an accomplished chef temporarily relinquishes the certainty of his own kitchen. By the final course at Mamina’s, Bech appeared to have found his sight again.