What do comic book artists eat in Egypt?
Or: the places that brought together two or more cartoonists — and sometimes just one cartoonist, that's enough.
Before I begin, I had in mind the importance of food in our lives as comic book artists, seen as a personal experience.
This time, we're not going to talk about comics. We're going to talk about what surrounds the comic artist. Next time, you'll find What do comic book artists in Egypt smoke?, and so on.
But for now, we're talking about food.
Restaurants that brought together two or three cartoonists. And sometimes just one cartoonist sitting alone in front of a plate — his mind completely elsewhere.
People imagine that comic artists live on coffee and cigarettes. People are wrong. We love to eat. Maybe more than anyone. Drawing takes energy. And eating gives it back.
As I said before, Golo had only one weakness in this world.
The lamb's head soup at the restaurant Awlad Karika.
The soup was white and light. Its smell: ancient spices, black pepper, and cumin. The meat melted in your mouth like butter. Golo would walk into the restaurant. He would say hello very softly. He would sit in the corner — always the same chair. He would order the soup without opening the menu.
But when we were all together in Egypt — me, Golo, and Shennawy — there was one place we loved.
The restaurant Bab el Yemen on Dokki Square, under the bridge.
To get there, you have to go under the bridge — that enormous bridge so high up you feel like it's going to fall on you at any moment. But it never did fall, thank God, not once.
The restaurant was big, two floors, wooden chairs, red lanterns, and Yemeni things hanging on the walls. The smell of wood and spices would greet you before you even entered the street.
The usual order: a pan-fried lamb liver.
This one was mouchatchata. Not just spicy — mouchatchata.
The liver cut small, fried with onions, garlic, and hot green peppers, and the tomato cooked slowly. The taste made you dizzy.
We ate and we sweated. From the face, the neck, and the back. Like someone running up stairs on a summer day.
Golo laughed: "Are we eating or working out?"
And with the liver — the mandi, chicken, and hanith. The chicken marinated with Yemeni spices you won't find anywhere else, and the hanith — rice, milk, broth, and spices — but really it was something light, it was the dish that truly gave you back your strength.
In the same Dokki neighborhood, also under the bridge, there was a place called Machawiyet Azama.
The owner was a huge guy, twice three times, his laugh was loud. Always wearing a dirty white apron because of the work.
My favorite spot and the cartoonist Ali Galal's, when financial conditions were favorable.
Ali Galal, may God have mercy on him, was a calm cartoonist, he focuses on everything, he doesn't talk much. But when he speaks, you listen.
He would choose the kebab carefully. He would turn it with his fork, smell it, then decide to eat.
The best thing at Azama wasn't the kebab. The best thing was the marinated eggplant.
That eggplant was a deep violet. Marinated in vinegar, garlic, and a little hot pepper. Ali Galal would start with it, before anything else.
"This eggplant is what opens your appetite so you can eat the kebab, even if it's below average, or even eat rocks afterward."
Shennawy — the cartoonist who should have been a chef
Let's come back once more to Shennawy.
Shennawy, if he hadn't been a cartoonist, he would have been a chef, a first-class cook. That guy has a sixth sense for food. Not just taste — it's science. He understands ingredients. He understands proportions. He understands timing.
He could eat something just once and tell you: "It's missing a pinch of cumin" or "The salt was added a little too early."
And just as he had taste in his choice of colors and framing in his drawings of the famous character saïss (the valet), he had the same taste in his choice of restaurants.
The koshari sauce from El Tahrir of the old days
It was Shennawy who first told me that its color was the color of the saïss's costume. That dark brown with a slight red in it. And it was true. I had seen it before but I hadn't known how to describe it. He described it in one sentence.
The second dish we loved, me and Shennawy: fish.
Here, we're talking about the Gombouriya fish restaurant in Zamalek. They made fish fajitas whose colors looked like they were drawn with dry pastel or soft pastel. The fish was white. The vegetables green, red, and yellow. The sauce light brown. The sandwich was a painting.
And the Bab el Nil fish restaurant in Bab el Louq.
It was a good choice back when Shennawy lived in downtown, close to his place. You'd walk down for five minutes, open the door, and find the calamari and shrimp piping hot. It was a privilege, and we were envied for it afterward — because Shennawy moved out of downtown. And Bab el Nil disappeared from our lives.
The only consolation is that he traded it for Bab el Yemen. One door leaves, another door arrives. ("Life takes and gives, and even if the night is long, it will eventually pass" — excerpt from a famous song, my apologies to Mounir.)
Breakfast — the most important meal of existence
Breakfast, for me, is the most important meal.
I wake up early. The world is quiet, the curtains are drawn, people are still asleep, and I am awake. My hands don't work, my head is at a standstill, even my eyes are only half open.
What turns on all these devices: two cups of tea. The first, on an empty stomach, in the silence. I drink it slowly watching the light crawl across the walls. Then breakfast. Then a second cup of tea.
This is the ritual. This is the system.
The artist Mohamed Wahba, whose laugh is loud, who always has a story to tell, shared with me the strangest, most beautiful, and most horrible breakfasts of my life.
We would meet in Zamalek, at a place whose name I will not say. Because the place was bad. Very bad.
We needed to take intestinal disinfectant with the fava beans (foul).
Imagine: you eat fava beans — ordinary fava beans — and you feel like you need a disinfectant. Maybe the tomatoes had fermented, maybe the oil was rancid, we didn't know. But we went there. Why? Maybe because it was close. Even bad food has its own charm.
And with those bad fava beans, we would sometimes have, for breakfast, béchamel pasta from the Bab el Louq market.
Béchamel pasta. For breakfast. In the morning. Early.
Not fresh, surely. Who makes fresh béchamel pasta at 8 in the morning? It was surely from the day before. God only knows. But the cheese was well baked, the béchamel had a nice golden crust, and the pasta still held together.
Wahba ate eagerly: "The pasta is magnificent."
I told him: "You said that yesterday about the bad fava beans."
"Yes. The fava beans were magnificent too, in their time."
Mohamed Wahba has a food philosophy that deserves respect: everything is better — at the right time.
And on the other side of the planet — literally — we were in Paris.
Me and Mohamed Wahba, we lived in the 4th arrondissement. Every day, we would get a brioche loaf from the bakery Aux Merveilleux de Fred.
The place is small. A brown, pompous storefront. The smell of butter and burnt sugar welcomes you. The brioche was soft inside, crispy outside, the sugar crumbs on top like morning dew.
I stopped once in front of the window and thought back on all of it: in Egypt, we ate fava beans with intestinal disinfectant. Here, we eat brioche from a shop called Aux Merveilleux. And we don't know which is more wonderful: the morning béchamel, the bad fava beans, or the crispy brioche.
Makhlouf and hands that open new doors
Let's return to adorable Cairo. To the fava beans, to the falafels, to the fried eggplants, and to the real good potatoes.
This is where the artist Makhlouf put me onto new things. I tried them all. I liked them all.
A sandwich with cheese, tomato, and falafel, at Al Shorouk restaurant on Mohamed Mahmoud Street.
The first time I heard about it, I was skeptical. Makhlouf insisted: "Just try it." I tried it. The falafel was crispy and hot, the cheese fresh and buttery, the tomato gave a slight acidity. The sandwich was strange, like jazz with instruments that aren't supposed to be together. But suddenly, it works.
And the plain fried eggplant sandwich, at Al Baghl — after two in the morning.
The eggplant is so hot it's still sizzling. Slightly crispy on the edges, not soggy, salted just right. You eat it standing in the street, the oil runs down your fingers, and you have five packs of tissues on you to clean up.
But here's what's important: Al Baghl, only after two. Before two, Al Baghl isn't good. The oil is old, the eggplant isn't crispy. The food isn't hot enough.
Mostafa Salem — the savior
This is where the artist Mostafa Salem, caricaturist, steps in.
Mostafa Salem always saved me and Makhlouf from the mistake of going to Al Baghl before two.
He had a clock in his head. When we went too early, he would shout: "It's still early! Let's go to Beshindi now, and we'll come back later."
Abdallah Beshindi in Al-Mounira. At his place, the falafel is yellow like the sun. And a cheddar falafel sandwich — the cheese melts inside the falafel. From the first bite, you feel it filling your mouth.
Mostafa was always right. We listened to him. And at Beshindi's, he welcomed us at any hour: in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the night, at dawn. Always present.
There are still stories left.
There are still restaurants I haven't remembered.
There are still cartoonists with whom we haven't gone hungry.
