Food Cart Review: Halal Egyptian Food

Ful (Photo credit).

Review: Halal Egyptian Food is a cart serving (you guessed it) delicious Egyptian cuisine.  I ordered the lamb with rice.  It came with hot sauce which was extremely spicy, as it should be for truly Egyptian cuisine.  The lamb itself was also very good.  The rice was a bright yellow, probably due to being cooked with saffron.  It also came with a yogurt-cucumber sauce.

Geography: Egyptian food is often thought of and presented in the United States as a typical Middle Eastern cuisine.  Many people use the over-generalized term "Mediterranean cuisine" to describe all cuisines coming from countries with a Mediterranean coastline.  This leads people to think that all of those cuisines are more or less the same.  However, you'd be hard-pressed to find many similarities between, say, Spanish and Greek food.  Implying that all of these unique cuisines are the same is kind of an insult to those cultures, because they have had at least centuries to form, refine, and perfect their food.

Egyptian food is especially unique because of two reasons.  For one thing, they had thousands of years to form a cuisine.  Also, Egypt is bordering what most people consider to be the Levant region of the Islamic world, but is located in the Maghreb (Northern Africa).  They share quite a bit with both Maghreb cuisine and Levant cuisine.  Then they have their own unique historical cuisine dating from ancient Egypt, which also is a powerful influence.

Then there is Cairo.  It is like Egypt's New York, with a lot of influence from international cuisine.  It may be more of an influence in the future because of a rapidly growing population.

Photo credit:

1. By Abdullah Geelah (English Wiki [1]) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons