Palm Hills Takes Cairo Food Week From West Cairo to East

Palm Hills has spent the past few years making a particular bet on Cairo - that where people live and where they go out should not be two entirely separate maps. Restaurants, hospitality and social spaces have become increasingly central to its communities, particularly in West Cairo, where a night out no longer necessarily begins with deliberating over who is willing to drive east.

Cairo Food Week has been testing that proposition rather enthusiastically. Palm Hills returns this year as the festival's West District Partner, continuing a relationship that has turned its restaurants into recurring stops for visiting chefs while steadily expanding the idea of what a culinary district in Cairo can look like. This time, however, the partnership does not stay west. Across the 2026 edition, Palm Hills will host CFW experiences at Palm Central, Palm Hills Katameya and The Glass House at Palm Hills One, effectively tracing a line from one side of the city to the other.

There is history behind the arrangement. In 2024, Scalini, Izakaya, Olivo and Galambo joined the programme; last year, the district expanded to include Mamina's, Cantina by Olivo and The Smokery, among others. Michelin-starred Paolo Griffa cooked at Scalini; Moonrise's Solemann Haddad joined Martin Rodriguez at Izakaya; Riccardo Forapani took over Mamina's; and Brooklyn pitmaster Billy Durney turned Cantina by Olivo into something resembling a Cairo block party.That history also makes sense within Cairo Food Week itself. Founded in 2023 by Hoda El-Sherif and Sherif Tamim of Flavor Republic, CFW has never been designed to happen in one place. The festival treats Cairo itself as its dining room: international and Egyptian chefs cook together in local kitchens; conversations move into showrooms; exhibitions into museums; dinners from restaurants to farms and the foot of the Pyramids. At its centre is a larger ambition to give Egyptian gastronomy and its people greater visibility within the international culinary conversation.

Its fourth edition, running September 24th through October 4th under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities' Egyptian Tourism Authority, stretches that geography further. Tables of Egypt takes over part of the Grand Egyptian Museum; CFW Conversations lands in Zamalek; dinners move through West and East Cairo before the programme reaches Downtown for its closing weekend. Palm Hills occupies several points on that map.

On September 29th and 30th, Palm Central becomes one of the week's western anchors. Scalini, Izakaya and Mamina's will host three chef-led experiences, including Gabriela Chamorro at Izakaya, with a private evening followed by ticketed dinners. These are not temporary dining rooms assembled for festival week; they are restaurants already woven into Palm Hills' everyday social life, temporarily handed a second culinary vocabulary.Then the premise crosses Cairo. On September 30th and October 1st, The Live Kitchen at Palm Hills Katameya will host private and ticketed dinners of its own, extending a partnership once concentrated in West Cairo into Palm Hills' eastern community. The movement is small on a festival calendar and considerably larger in what it says about the brand: dining and hospitality are being treated as part of the architecture of a place, rather than amenities attached after the houses are built.

There is one more address. On October 1st, The Glass House at Palm Hills One will host a cocktail reception conceived as an introduction to Palm Hills One itself. The Glass House isn't intended as a detached event venue so much as a physical expression of the project — its architecture, views and social life brought into three dimensions, with people inside it.

This is where Palm Hills' “Pride of an Address” begins to acquire a more literal meaning. An address, after all, is rarely loved for its coordinates. It is loved for the coffee downstairs, the restaurant where the waiter knows your order and for the accumulating rituals that Palm Hills fronts when it comes to "changing the living experience in Egypt".

It also explains why Palm Hills and Cairo Food Week have found such durable common ground. Flavor Republic's festival is interested in food as culture — something produced by cities, communities, memory and exchange, rather than simply by chefs. Palm Hills approaches the question from the other direction: what has to exist around a home for an address to acquire a life of its own?

For eleven days this fall, part of the answer will be dinner.