At Mamina’s La Ferrari Meets Koshari in a Dinner of Inheritances

At Mamina’s Palm Hills, the room announced itself before the first dish did. The Farouk family’s restaurant is layered like a palimpsest — shelves cluttered with glass from Paris, ceramics picked up in Rome, a miscellany that resists tidying. It’s a space worn soft by the residue of dinners that came before.Riccardo Forapani entered into this familiarity carrying his own inheritance. Thirteen years with Bottura, a career made in Modena’s kitchens, the precision of Cavallino folded into his sleeves. He set down La Ferrari: sturgeon, squid ink, lentils black as tarmac, the glint of speed translated into food. Alongside it, Mamina’s countered with a fried koshari arancini, rice and lentils locked inside a crisp shell. The combination shouldn’t have worked, but together they had the ease of long-lost relatives, reunited and slightly amused at the resemblance.Palm Hills, Cairo Food Week’s largest district partner, framed it all. Their argument is not just that West Cairo can host culture, but that it can generate it. That a suburban dining room can carry the weight of Modena, the warmth of Cairo, and still leave space for something new. Hospitality here isn’t façades and square meters — it’s the precise alchemy of place, plate, and presence.

The service carried no Michelin stiffness. Waiters described ingredients like you’d describe family gossip — precise, affectionate, half-spilling over itself. Guests leaned into one another, voices rising, tables closing in. Fine dining loosened here. The Farouks built Mamina’s from a lifetime of travel and return; Forapani brought with him Modena’s discipline, its velocity. Between them, the evening was a series of parallel lines briefly intersecting, two inheritances sharing the same plate without needing to collapse into one.