Chef Marwa Mehanna Takes Over Sahel's Mariolino for One Seaside Night

The contemporary dinner party has acquired an alarming number of responsibilities. Dinner, apparently, is no longer enough; there must be candlelight, an intelligently dishevelled table, arranged produce, and preferably a body of water nearby.

On August 20th, Chef Marwa Mehanna is taking the assignment seriously, commandeering Mariolino at Ramla on Egypt’s North Coast for one night of long tables, abundant seafood and a Mediterranean menu designed for the ancient but recently fashionable business of sharing.Mehanna, an Egyptian chef and recipe developer, has made something of a practice of treating dinner as a matter of composition: food, flowers, objects and hospitality arranged with the understanding that people eat partly with their eyes and considerably with their surroundings. For Mariolino, she is drawing from Egyptian and Spanish Mediterranean cooking, working with seafood and seasonal produce on a menu intended to travel across the table rather than remain obediently within the jurisdiction of a single diner.

Mehanna is shaping the menu and culinary direction with Mariolino, while the setting, music and table are being treated as part of the same composition. The ambition is intimacy and the beautifully assembled summer gathering your friends might conceivably throw, provided your friends possessed a chef, an eye for tablescaping and the administrative competence to organise anything beyond a WhatsApp poll.