Restaurant review: I am excited to see what Cairo 2 Cork food truck does next with its menu
Cairo 2 Cork is a canny offering. Picture: Joe McNamee
On a torrential November morn that requires plotting a route into town to avoid multiple floods, we end up parked atop Paul St Car Park. It is a structure not so much brutalist architecture as just plain brutal, as if caveman had been given concrete and a three-week turnaround time, a shoe-in for ugliest edifice in Cork if it weren’t eclipsed by the even uglier North Main St car park a few hundred metres west along the river.
Forty years old this year, it is to the rear of Paul St Shopping Centre which too had grown scruffy and tired until a recent change of ownership saw a general sprucing up. To the front is Rory Gallagher Plaza, where Cairo 2 Cork is sited alongside another food truck, today shuttered. I suspect this is at the behest of the centre’s new ownership, Mahon Point Farmer’s Market having shown the nation’s cannier shopping centre owners that nothing draws footfall like hot food trucks.
I first heard of the Cairo 2 Cork food truck upon learning the Egyptian ambassador to Ireland had written to its chef-proprietor Nivene Sadick to congratulate her on being the first to serve Egyptian food in Ireland.
I’ve never been to Egypt but you can still learn much about a country through its food culture and Sadick’s Egyptian Munch Box (€16) tells quite a tale, not least that both Egyptians and Irish share a real grá for the carbs. A current on trend street food favourite in Egypt, it is a fast food (in a good way) version of a mezze plate: A boisterous assemblage of items from across the menu, all crammed together cheek to cheek. Just two of us, it allows a broader sampling of the menu.
The mix is as follows: Protein is a generous serving of the two shawarma meats on the menu, chicken and beef, both succulent, tender, with balanced spicing, chicken slightly shading it in the flavour stakes. The distinctly non-keto carbs combo consists of Cairo 2 Cork’s Egyptian-style mac and cheese, vermicelli rice and seasoned fries.Â
I put on pounds just thinking about it but teenage No 1 Son is all over it in a heartbeat. All three are sound iterations but consuming the entirety is very much a young man’s game. I seek atonement for calorific sins in the crunchy salad of mixed leaves and cucumber, dressed in lemon and olive oil, with pickled green peppers on the side. Tahini sauce is drizzled over the box for magnificently messy munching.
The Cairo Crunch (€13) is actually a hawawshi, another classic Egyptian street food staple, pitta stuffed with spiced minced lamb, onions, and
parsley and then grilled to a crisp. It is served with either tahini or garlic sauce. I’d prefer the meat less densely packed to allow greater latitude for otherwise sound flavours and textures to strut their stuff, but it is still damned tasty. While the Munch Box is a sit-down and strap-in affair, this is an ideal snack for devouring on the hoof, with all the potential to become a local favourite.
Other than a passion I developed years ago in London for the iconic fava bean dish, ful medames, my experience of Egyptian food is limited. However, I have put away more than a few shawarmas in my time. Shawarma is thinly sliced meat wrapped in a great cone around a metal skewer and cooked vertically, rotisserie-style. It is a technique that weaves its way through many Levantine cuisines (eg Turkish doner kebab), most commonly made with lamb, but Sadick opts for beef or chicken (€13).Â
There is no space in this truck for a spit but beef is succulent, tender, though not overly so, retaining a nice toothsome bite. Rolled up in a flatbread with salad and garlic sauce (spicy house sauce and tahini are alternative options), it is a super snack.
Falafel bites (€6.50) are Egyptian-style, made with fava beans rather than chickpeas. Deep-fried and crunchy exteriors conceal a fluffy, verdant green heart, herbaceous flavours a-go-go. Sadick doesn’t include salt, fearing it will affect the bright green of the herbs but workarounds are possible and this good falafel could be great falafel with nature’s finest flavour enhancer.
Cairo 2 Cork is a canny offering. Sadick, half-Egyptian, half-Irish, and raised in Cork by her Egyptian dad and Cork mum, does a very smart job of tailoring North African flavours to the local palate, but I am very excited to see what happens as she expands the repertoire. She is cautious about the notion of adding ful mesdames, a primal Egyptian comfort food, though probably not the first choice for youthful fans of ‘filthy’ street food. However, I reckon her planned addition of koshary (kushari or koshari), a combo of fried rice, pasta, and pulses — Egypt’s national dish and popular street food — will be a smash with Cork eaters.
The day being too wet and miserable to sit at the metal tables on the plaza, we head back up to our rooftop perch at the top of the car park, sitting in the boot with the boot door open above us for some shelter. It may be the second ugliest building in Cork but the view is magnificent, all around the city. We may not be able to see the pyramids or Cairo from here but we’re certainly getting a lovely taste of Egypt.
Rory Gallagher Plaza, Paul St, Cork
Meal for two with soft drinks cost €53.50
Instagram: @Cairo2CorkFoodTruck
