This Asian Fusion Spot Started With a Coldplay Concert

When Ahmed ElAshry travelled to the UAE for a Coldplay concert in 2025, his friend Omar Abdelbary told him he would take him to get the best Asian food he’s ever had. ElAshry was sceptical: he’d been all the way to China before and still wasn’t a fan. But something, maybe Coldplay’s joyous music, told him he should give it another try.

“I ate the whole plate and licked it,” says ElAshry. “I had like three main dishes and two appetizers alone.” Abdelbary had taken him to Chef Eric Lee’s Ugly Noodles, and though ElAshry had no background in the F&B industry—he furnishes and rents properties in Cairo and Sahel—when he tried Lee’s restaurant, he felt he had to bring the concept back to Egypt.

“Ugly Fest was the name Eric used when he did pop-ups abroad,” explains ElAshry. “We said, ‘Let’s see what people in Egypt would say.’” Chef Lee agreed. The three of them—ElAshry, Abdelbary, and Lee—decided to launch Ugly Fest together in Egypt, landing in Sahel in Summer 2025.

Facing a food truck scene mostly saturated with cuisines west of the Middle East, Ugly Fest’s noodles quickly became a hit in Sahel. The food was so good that, back in the UAE, Chef Lee ended up winning Shark Tank Dubai, which prompted the three co-founders to rename Ugly Fest to Jinju to avoid any legal issues. (“The rebranding took three weeks,” ElAshry tells SceneEats, “one of the hardest things we did.”) But with the seal of approval from the Sahel crowd and from various food influencers, ElAshry and the crew decided to try their luck in Cairo starting with a spot at TBK in New Cairo’s South 90 Road.

“Most people who knew us from Sahel found that the noodles here were even better,” says ElAshry. According to him, starting his first F&B venture in Sahel was a terrifying experience because of how difficult the operations were. “I may as well have opened in Cairo,” he says.

Here, too, Jinju found its crowd. “In Maadi and Nasr, you’ll find very authentic Asian food, which not every Egyptian can eat. I personally can’t.” In other words, what they wanted was fusion. Chef Lee, born in the Netherlands to a family from Hong Kong, raised in England, and now residing in Dubai, was exactly the kind of person who could bring that fusion.

Jinju, which means pearl in Korean, is mainly about the noodles—but they also make chicken sandwiches, starters like wontons, tenders, crispy shrimp and fortune cookies.

“The noodles we make you won’t find elsewhere in Egypt, even in Maadi.” Their signature Jinju noodles, with a house-made spicy sesame sauce, coriander, crushed peanuts, cucumbers, and your choice of beef or chicken, packs a punch that will leave you wondering if the noodles you’ve had before were actually any good at all. Their Shanghai noodles, meanwhile, stir-fried in garlic scallion oil and leaning more into umami, are ones you should “slurp responsibly,” according to Jinju.

Sourcing only a fifth of their supplies from the UAE and the rest from Egypt, ElAshry finds that the local ingredients here give the flavours in his noodles more of a kick. “The spices we have in Egypt are stronger than in the UAE, so the taste is more flavourful. When I tasted it here, there’s something more, even if it’s the exact same recipe.”

Though Jinju is currently open in one location, ElAshry and his team are eyeing expansion to Madinaty, Sheikh Zayed, and Alexandria. Before that, however, Jinju is bringing back some menu items like their beef burgers and introducing, for the first time, their rice bowls—something they’re very, very excited for.