There Are Zero Michelin Stars in Africa. Could Cairo Get the First?

Since the awarding of its first star in 1926 in France, the Michelin guide has stood as the uncontested designator of top restaurant quality. By telling drivers where to find restaurants worth driving to, what began as a tire company’s attempt to get more cars on the road has since become the culinary world’s most sought-after recognition for its ability to turn chefs into celebrities and restaurants into travel destinations. 100 years later, however, the pursuit of good food has not yet driven Michelin to Egypt—or anywhere else in Africa. Aside from Antarctica, it is the only continent left without a Michelin guide.

Is it simply that we do not have Michelin-quality restaurants? It’s more complicated than that. Since 2022, cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, Riyadh, AlUla, and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and Doha in Qatar have all received Michelin guides. Yet, in 2026, it was Egyptian restaurant Khufu’s that earned the top spot on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants, beating out Michelin-starred restaurants across the region. Of course, these are two different rating systems, but it still raises the question: why doesn’t Egypt have a Michelin guide?

Like any investment, a Michelin guide costs money.

As opposed to the Michelin keys, which have been awarded globally since their creation in 2024, and of which Egypt has earned 15 across 13 different hotels, the Michelin guide is a city-based guide. For Michelin to launch a guide in a new city, its full-time inspectors must visit the city’s restaurants and decide which ones to award stars and which ones to simply mention. This comes at a price.

“It’s an investment on Michelin’s end,” says Hoda El Sherif, the CEO and co-founder of Flavor Republic, whose brainchild Cairo Food Week recently completed its fourth edition. “Either they come to a market where there’s many things happening across the food industry, or someone has to pay for them to be there. In the case of Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, what did they do? They paid them.”

El Sherif revealed to SceneEats that based on previous conversations between Flavor Republic and representatives of Michelin, securing a Michelin guide in Cairo would cost nearly $2 million per year, a sum which sits squarely between figures paid by cities like Seoul and Bangkok. Michelin’s contracts in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have not been publicly disclosed.

Who’s going to foot the bill?

Crucially, this sum cannot come from a private entity like Flavor Republic. It must instead come from a governmental source, such as a tourism board. Therefore, while Egypt’s private sector has organized initiatives like Cairo Food Week, Taste El Gouna, and the upcoming Future Hospitality Summit, securing a Michelin guide in Egypt must be a government priority and decision.

“A very big part of the reason we don’t yet have a Michelin guide is that we don’t have a governmental culinary entity yet,” says Reem Khamis, a Content Director at Flavor Republic and the co-founder of Early Bird Club. “Saudi Arabia received their Michelin guide right around the time they formed a culinary commission.”

Formed in 2020 under the Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia’s Culinary Arts Commission was created to foster food culture nationally and promote the Kingdom as a dining destination internationally. By 2025, it succeeded in bringing in the Michelin guide, which debuted its first ever Riyadh, Jeddah, and AlUla lists in December 2025. In Dubai, it is Visit Dubai that sponsors the Michelin Guide; in Abu Dhabi it is the Department of Culture and Tourism.

If a Michelin guide does not guarantee stars—what’s the ROI?

Despite their investments, and despite bringing in many previously awarded chefs to open ventures in the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia was not awarded any Michelin stars in 2026. In Cairo, Hoda El Sherif and Reem Khamis agree that this would probably be the case as well.

“We have a lot of what they would call the Bib Gourmand,” says Reem Khamis. A Michelin Bib Gourmand is an award separate from the Michelin star that recognizes restaurants which serve high-quality food at a great value for money. Baky Hospitality's REIF Kushiyaki in Dubai, for example, was awarded a Bib Gourmand this year. In Egypt, REIF could similarly be a contender for this award.

“The chefs in Egypt who are creating change and an impact and a movement are creating things like supper clubs; they’re not in restaurants,” says El Sherif. Egyptian chefs choosing to forego the restaurant route is part of the reason why, in her view, there are not enough restaurants in a city like Cairo to entice Michelin to come on its own.

It’s also part of the reason why, if the Ministry of Tourism were to consider footing the bill for setting up a Michelin guide in Cairo, there would be little return on their investment by way of food tourism, because there are not yet enough top-quality restaurants in the ecosystem that could contend for a Michelin star.

So what would our restaurants need to earn Michelin stars?

A Michelin star is not a measure of how good a country’s cuisine is. Instead, it is awarded to a restaurant where there is ‘outstanding cooking’, regardless of cuisine, price point, service, and décor. There are several elements at play, but what they boil down to is a restaurant with a vision, that can consistently execute that vision and serve food of the highest possible quality.

“For a long time, people were talking about Egyptian food as something that you eat at home, or in a traditional place,” says Giovanni Bolandrini, the CEO and Founder of Pier88 Group, which opened Khufu’s to the world in 2022. “Khufu’s was our way of saying that it can also have a place in a serious restaurant, with its own identity and its own standards. We don’t need to make Egyptian food something else to make people respect it.”

Awarded the number one spot on MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2026, ahead of the Michelin-starred restaurants of UAE and Qatar, Khufu’s would likely be Egypt’s top contender for a Michelin star. Yet, in addition to calling on more government support in the F&B industry to help put Egypt’s food on the map, Bolandrini says that there are still notable gaps that need to be addressed in Egypt’s culinary infrastructure.

It starts before the kitchen, with the consistency and quality of ingredients.

The first of Michelin’s five “universal” criteria happens entirely outside the restaurant: ingredient quality. Bolandrini says that in Egypt, the availability and quality of ingredients has improved drastically in the past ten years, but what is still lacking is consistency.

“At Khufu’s, we try to use all local ingredients as much as we can,” he explains, “but sometimes the local ingredients are not the best, so we need to import.” However, this introduces another issue: “One day you can import something that you need, and the next day you can’t find it,” Bolandrini says.

Consistency across time is another key element of Michelin’s criteria, and relying on imported ingredients makes it harder to guarantee this consistency. Addressing both of these issues is therefore something that begins at the level of Egypt’s agricultural and agri-tech sectors, Michelin or not.

There’s no shortage of great chefs, but they need backing.

Michelin stars are awarded to restaurants, not chefs. However, one of the five criteria of the Michelin star is ‘how the chef’s personality shines through their cuisine’.

“We have an immense amount of talent, but we have very little encouragement to this talent” says Chef Mirette Aly, the co-founder of TLT Concepts which helped pioneer a different kind of fine-dining in Egypt when it first opened in 2014. In a landscape where restaurants are still more known for their restaurateurs than their head chefs, Aly has used TLT Concepts to spotlight emerging chefs and lead them to develop their own ventures.

“There’s a whole new generation of Egyptian chefs that has received a fantastic amount of education and first-hand experience inside kitchens, who know how to cook authentic Egyptian cuisine but also creative and progressive Egyptian cuisine,” Aly says. “We have to try to make this talent ripen and shine, and nurture them to create their own businesses.”

Where there is a shortage, however, is in the managers, captains (head waiters), and other staff required to run a top-level restaurant.

“I am struggling to find the necessary calibre of people at the white-collar level,” adds Bolandrini. “When there is one good employee available in the market, everyone tries to snatch them. There are certain positions that are needed in an F&B company that you just cannot find here.”

To create this calibre of staff which is now increasingly in demand by Egypt’s burgeoning culinary scene, Bolandrini and Aly both point to the need for a more professional and academically rooted approach to the culinary discipline.

Having a Michelin guide in Egypt is not just a matter of O'det El Khawaga—it would help drive the competition and necessary investments to improve Egypt’s culinary ecosystem as a whole.

Chef Mostafa Seif, Executive Chef of Khufu’s, says that for him, having a Michelin guide in Egypt is not the final goal. “The goal is to build restaurants that are excellent, consistent, authentic, and relevant, whether Michelin is watching or not,” he tells SceneEats.

Yet, he also acknowledges the benefits the guide would bring. “Of course, having Michelin in Egypt would be important. It would bring international attention and create opportunities for restaurants and chefs. It would help more people around the world discover Egyptian cuisine.”

Whereas he believes Egypt already has the talent, ingredients, and culinary identity needed to have Michelin-quality restaurants, he points towards the need to continue developing restaurants that are not only technically strong, but which have a clear identity and tell the story of Egypt through their food.

“I want Egyptian cuisine to reach the global map because of its own identity and quality. If Michelin comes and recognizes that, it would be a great achievement for Egypt and for everyone working to move Egyptian cuisine forward.”

But if getting Egypt’s food on the global map is the ultimate goal, there are better ways than a Michelin guide.

For the same cost as the Michelin guide would require every year, Hoda El Sherif estimates that Egypt could sponsor two festivals the size of Cairo Food Week, “and still have the same kind of impact as they would just paying just royalty to the guide.”

Saudi Arabia, which has poured substantial investments into bringing big-name chefs to the Kingdom and sponsoring a Michelin guide, has not yet succeeded in earning any Michelin stars, despite more than a hundred new stars being awarded around the globe in 2026. Meanwhile, other countries without a Michelin guide have succeeded in putting their food on the map.

El Sherif points to Peru as an example. Peru has never had a Michelin guide, but Peruvian cuisine today is regularly recognized as among the world’s finest, topping rankings such as the World Culinary Awards and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, and having its dishes recognized as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. These achievements only began in 2008 with the first Mistura Food Festival, which was founded in Lima by Chef Gastón Acurio and the Association of Peruvian Gastronomy—a non-governmental collection of chefs and restaurant owners.

For the same amount of money required to sponsor a guide, El Sherif says that a more impactful initiative might instead be something like Netflix’s Street Food series. “This is where the real investment lies,” she says. “For Street Food Asia and Street Food South America, Netflix worked with the tourism boards of those countries. These are the things making an impact right now.”

“In this day and age, having an award-winning show come to Cairo to explore the food scene, whether it’s on Netflix or more snackable content platforms—this is the kind of exposure we need.”