Chocolate in Cairo

This second part of education of Cairo's culinary delicacies is being included on my own whim. As any woman will understand, chocolate in constant supply is part of any good diet to promote mental, if not physical, health.

About halfway through the summer portion of the CASA program, a friend of mine who had lived in Cairo before, mentioned off-handedly that the Four Seasons Hotel, located on the banks of the Nile, has an all-you-can-eat chocolate buffet every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, if I'm remembering correctly. The price is 65 £E (little more than $11) which was a bit drastic for our stipends, but still worth it. So in celebration of the end of the summer session, we headed over to the air-conditioned lobby of the Four Seasons hotel, where a musician was playing live piano music, to sit and relax and eat as much chocolate as our stomachs could stand.

The "buffet" (I use quotation marks because I had a 20-ft long buffet table with chocolate bars the size of my head pictured in my greedy little mind) is a lovely round table, about 3 feet in diameter loaded with exquisite truffles, tasty little cakes, and melted chocolate in a pot (for dipping shish-kebobbed pineapple, strawberries and bananas), all of which was gourmet-quality. Despite bragging that I would probably be going up for 3 or 4 helpings, I found myself incapable of finishing my second helping.

Still, that didn't stop me from returning. Over the course of my 12 months in Cairo, I probably visited the Four Seasons's Chocolate Buffet 6 or 7 times with various friends and family, to celebrate the end of a semester or someone's visit. Sometimes the piano player would be there, sometimes a guitar player was there. Each of them knew only about 5 songs so if I stayed long enough, I could listen to the same song 2 or 3 times. A few of the ladies working in the buffet began to recognize me, which I found amusing. And it's always handy to have someone recognize you in a food establishment because you know they'll work hard to get you a place to sit (as seating was indeed limited some nights).

The bell in the picture here was a present from a friend from the buffet and was consumed in one sitting (it's hollow).

And now to add a little ps, I answer a question I posed in the previous post. I challenged anyone to guess what I might be eating in the picture and for those of you who happened to guess kirsha, you were correct. Do not confuse kirsha with the koshiri I described, which is made of rice, macaroni noodles, fried onions, lentils and marinara sauce. Kirsha is wild baby buffalo stomach. I had my bite here before knowing what it was and it actually doesn't taste all that bad. But once I knew, I wasn't able to eat it again.