TLT Concepts Turns Surplus into Supper at LUHV For Cairo Food Week.

Cairo Food Week has spent its fourth edition making an argument that extends well beyond restaurants. Across its ten-day citywide programme, visiting chefs have entered Cairo kitchens, Egyptian cooks have taken on larger stages, growers and producers have joined conversations usually reserved for chefs, and exhibitions and dinners have considered food as something shaped by agriculture, memory, design and the people responsible for carrying it forward.

At LUHV by TLT Concepts, several of those threads arrived at the same table.

For Cairo Food Week 2026, Head Chef Dina Hosny and chocolatière Clara Dayoub came together to create 'A Shared Story of Home', a culinary experience built around Egyptian food traditions, local sourcing and a conversation around food waste, with much of the menu centred on ingredients that might otherwise have been discarded.It was a particularly tangible expression of one of the ideas running through this year’s programme: that food is not only about what ends up on the plate, but how we value what gets there in the first place. At LUHV, that meant giving new purpose to ingredients including onion peelings and the whey produced during the ricotta-making process, turning kitchen by-products into part of the meal rather than treating them as waste.

For Hosny, that approach is becoming part of how her kitchen operates. A Le Cordon Bleu London graduate who trained at Four Seasons before developing her cooking through Dine With Deenuh pop-ups, she now leads LUHV with a vocabulary built around Middle Eastern and Mediterranean influences, local ingredients and a more considered approach to how those ingredients are used.Dayoub brought her own history with the idea to the table. The Maison Choc founder had previously created Balady Bread Crisps, transforming potentially discarded pieces of Egypt’s most ubiquitous staple with artisanal chocolate and honey. At LUHV, balady bread returned in a different form, becoming a starting point for thinking about what an ingredient is worth, and how far it can go before we decide it is waste.
The dinner was held under the roof of TLT Concepts co-founder and Executive Chef Mirette Aly, whose wider work has also explored food, sustainability and the value of what we already have. Earlier in Cairo Food Week, she launched Karam, an initiative that rescues surplus food and transforms it into meals made available to people in need through a network of vending machines.

'A Shared Story of Home' also showcased the creativity of Egypt's next generation of chefs and culinary creators. Hosny and Dayoub's menu was just as much a showcase of their individual ingenuity as it was an exploration of the ideas behind it, as they came together to look at Egyptian food from both ends of the table: the traditions and ingredients that have long defined it, and the ways chefs are beginning to reconsider how those ingredients are sourced, used and valued.

One table, in other words, but a considerably larger conversation around it.