Zooba. Koshari. Egypt.
Dish: 8/10
Very Good. Would go back for more if we were Oliver Twist.
Restaurant: 5/10
Solid. Nice. Nothing to write-home about.
Koshari is Egypt's national dish and what a fantastic and original dish it is. We are unaware of any national dish that has quite such a diverse and unusual assortment of carbs and proteins, representative of Egypt's unique place in world culture. We knew nothing of the dish before we visited Zooba, a Cairo-based fast-food chain with a single US location in SoHo.
This may be our favorite dish so far of the challenge and while we try to avoid visits to SoHo if we possibly can, when we are in the area we always want to drop into Zooba.
What the?
Pasta, rice, lentils, noodles, chickpeas, tomato sauce and fried onions. How does that grab you? What reads like a mixed bag of leftovers thrown together at 1am is made delicious by the same folks who brought you the Pyramids, Mummies and Bowling (apparently). We do wonder if that's how Egyptians eat it - as a combo of remainders - or if they go to the great trouble of cooking all those Ingredients Individually before combining them. If you had pasta on monday, rice on tuesday, noodles on wednesday and chickpeas on thursday then Koshari is a great friday night leftover dish, but otherwise we're only buying it at places like Zooba.
It's an almost perfect plate of food, with various textures and savory flavors brought together by lightly spiced tomato sauce and those fried onions. While far from a heavy dish, it does feel like a plate that's best devoured in the colder months. Not that Egypt has those.
Egypt and Egyptian Americans
What do you know about Egypt? We knew relatively little and that hasn't changed much. We like the Egyptian section of The Met, but that's all in reference to a civilization that died out millenia ago. More recently, we have some vague sense that there was a war in the 1960s that was important. But we have somewhere between zero and very little idea of what modern-day Egypt is like.
A quick glance at the human rights organizations' summaries of countries shows that Egyptian people aren't particularly free to speak their minds. The crackdown following the Arab Spring of 2011 has resulted in countries like Egypt becoming more extreme and more fascistic.
The country isn't poor, overall, with a higher GDP in 2024 than countries like Portugal, Peru and New Zealand, but it has a fairly poor Wealth Gini (a measurement of wealth inequality) according to the World Bank, putting it much higher than the United States (one of the worst performing countries on this Index), but in the realm of Iran, Cyprus and Norway.
Egyptian Americans are mostly Coptic Orthodox Christians - a minority religious group In Egypt, and a persecuted one back home. While there are more Egyptians in California, there is no metropolitan district with more residents of Egyptian-descent than New York City.
Zooba
Zooba is pretty rare on our list of restaurants, in that it's actually a chain based in the country of origin. Founded in 2012 in Cairo, Zooba now has outposts here, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudia Arabia (as of 2025). They have turned Egyptian streetfood into a casual-eating concept that, at least to us, feels like it's got legs if diners decide it's convenient enough. Koshari might not be the most quick-and-easy, eat-with-your-hands concept, but everything else on the menu - mostly sandwiches and bowls - seems like it would do well multiple places as a lunch and quick-dinner go-to. It's not fancy by any means. You don't come for the digs (we don't think...apparently some do), you come for a quick, simple, delicious plate of food.
Whatever hideous crackdowns and antidemocratic shit goes down in Egypt lately, it speaks well of the country that a concept like Zooba can exist and take it on the road. Hopefully Egyptian officials are aware that while their government is shit, their food is not, and they could probably serve to think of themselves more like Koshari, and a little less like flavorless hummus. But hey - we're not preaching. It's hard to make a good country. Almost all of them suck. And the temptation to refuse to give the people what they want is apparently completely overwhelming for all those in power.
شكرا لك! مع السلامة!