Veggie

Much as we like meat and fish, our go-to comfort foods are always vegetarian – pasta, Israeli couscous, mujadra with tahini and salad, or kusheri with tomato salsa.

Our kusheri has not always been popular with everyone. In Cairo you can buy this dish – rice, lentils, pasta and chickpeas, scented with cumin, caramelised onion and cinnamon – from street vendors, served in a cone of old newspaper and topped with tomato sauce. When we opened the restaurant we had a vision of a bowl on the counter by the window filled with kusheri, which we would sell in cones made of old menus. But because we had just opened, we didn’t have any old menus yet, so we had to use new paper. And we hadn’t thought about how our customers would transport a paper cone filled with rice and tomato sauce back to the office along with their handbags, laptop bags, bicycle bags and any other bags they had. Another hitch was that the office workers of central London, unlike the labourers of Cairo, are quite conscious of their waistlines and tend to avoid carb-explosion dishes of this kind.