We Let a Dog Named Croissant Rate Zamalek’s Croissants

Ben Jenkins arrived in Cairo with his dog, Croissant. What he hadn’t accounted for was the fine print of international pet travel: Croissant was still under six months old, which meant the two of them were temporarily grounded until the pup became airline-eligible.

So while Croissant worked on aging into a globally mobile citizen, we decided to make the wait productive.

Naturally: a croissant crawl.

We took Ben - and Croissant, who approached the assignment with professional seriousness - around Zamalek, stopping at Haven, Cake Café, Holm, and Social to identify the neighborhood’s most convincing croissant. This was not a casual pastry outing. It was a structured tasting with four extremely rigorous judging criteria: the sniff test (conducted exclusively by Croissant), flakiness, honeycomb structure, and butter quality.

Some croissants arrived properly laminated. Others leaned… dense. There were shards of pastry everywhere, a few questionable interiors, and at least one moment where Croissant expressed a very clear opinion.

Watch the full crawl on www.SceneEats.com orto see how each bakery scored — and which croissant ultimately earned Croissant’s official approval.