Farah El Charkawy & Tamara Rigo Explore Dessert as Discipline

What happens when seaweed, figs and spearmint meet on a single plate? At the Cairo Food Week dinner at Fôu, Egyptian Chef Farah El Charkawy and Italian Chef Tamara Rigo presented pastry not as an afterthought but as the principal language of a multi-course tasting. Their menu brought together sweet and savoury, hot and cold, and soft and crunchy, placing pastry not as a curtain call after the main course, but as an affair to watch all on its own.

The dinner unfolded like a storybook, the menu being its contents page. ‘So Here We Are, Sitting Under an Olive Tree’ read one chapter title, under which Farah and Tamara served a fresh, olive and cucumber-based palate cleanser, one that united them in both heritage and palate. Another more playfully asks ‘Guess What - Millefeuille…”, challenging guests to pinpoint what it was that brought berries and rose together.

“The very concept of the event was shared between us,” Farah tells Scene Eats, “We would split each dish into multiple senses, and tried to cover our bases. Tamara brought lemons to smell for one course, and I infused our cutlery with the scent of oud.”

They moved through the Fôu kitchen with the easy precision of collaborators who no longer needed to speak every instruction aloud. What would prove the most demanding service to mount became an exercise in choreography: to preserve intimacy across four nights the chefs rehearsed their menu not twice but four times, rebuilding the same delicate sequence each evening. By the second run Tamara felt less like a guest and more like furniture in the room; by the first, the brigade had already folded her into its rhythm.

“It’s such an exciting privilege to be working with another young female pastry chef,” Tamara tells Scene Eats, “We built everything together from scratch; it wasn’t like alternating dishes to create a shared menu. In each bite, you taste both Egypt and Italy.”

Between courses Farah and Tamara traded quiet conspiracies behind counters, laughing with the kind of relief that follows hard work done well. They plated beside the waiters to watch how each bite landed, learning from the way a dining room inhaled. When they presented, sentences finished each other as if thought had been practised together for years — the kind of organic synchronicity that comes from shared method and shared love for precision.“There’s a lot of chemistry between Tamara and I,” Farah said. “We both work in the same way. She, like me, was eager to prepare a rigorous floor plan, and we were both running around the kitchen throughout the dinner.”The evening’s success lay in its restraint. The chefs resisted the urge to dazzle with sheer abundance, instead pursuing a curated minimalism where each course resolved a single question about contrast, temperature or structure. Diners left carrying concrete impressions—memories of crunch against silk, of non-tacky leather on leather (the latter being food-grade custom plates provided by Leopelle’s Ahmed Gabbas), of citrus that blooms in a single elevated bowl. It’s a dinner that stays not only on your tongue, but on all five of your senses, until the next day.