Backstory: my wife and I arrive in Giza for a five-day stay, during which we plan to visit the Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Saqqara, and everything else. We are staying in a magnificent Airbnb whose owner, even before we have unloaded our suitcases from the taxi, assigns us a young boy who leads us to a nearby restaurant to eat “the best koshari in Cairo”. I readily agree, because before coming to Egypt I had done my research and koshari was unanimously described as the Egyptian national dish, an absolute must-eat in Cairo.The good lad takes us to the scene of the crime and then sits next to us for the entire duration of lunch, watching our reactions as we “enjoy” the koshari. Imagine me, an introvert, forced to spend an entire meal with a stranger staring at me. End of backstory.
Egyptian koshari is one of those dishes that makes you question not only local taste, but the very concept of gastronomic consensus. When faced with a bowl of koshari, the first rational reaction is not “how good,” but “who is messing with me?”
For those unfamiliar with it, koshari is an anarchic orgy of carbohydrates: rice, pasta, lentils, chickpeas. All together. Without hierarchy. Without a clear idea. Completing the work is a vaguely acidic tomato sauce, fried onions deployed with the subtlety of a car jack hurled into someone’s teeth, and—at the executioner’s discretion—a splash of vinegar or hot sauce that seems designed solely to distract the diner from everything else. It is as if someone had emptied the contents of a student pantry directly onto a plate and then declared: “tradition.”
The problem is not only the conceptual mishmash, but the perceived quality of the ingredients. Nothing really tastes like anything. Rice tastes like rice. Pasta tastes like pasta (overcooked, to be safe). Lentils do their job without enthusiasm. Chickpeas seem to have wandered in by mistake. It is a dish that stubbornly rejects any form of momentum, harmony, or guilty pleasure. It is not comfort food: it is dietary resignation.
At this point, an alternative hypothesis naturally arises, far more convincing than any anthropological explanation: koshari is a prank. A gigantic, centuries-old collective prank at the expense of the rest of the world, methodically planned by the entire Egyptian population. If you dare say it is inedible, they explain that “you don’t get it,” that “it’s culture,” that “you need to grow up.” Then all of Egypt, unseen, gathers behind a crumbling building in Giza, and everyone laughs until they convulse, cry, turn cyanotic, and pass out from lack of oxygen. Otherwise, there is no explanation.
