Egyptian restaurants offer a mixed bag of experiences for vegetarians.If you’re happy to go local and eat at cheap, no frills places then vegetarian food is plentiful.

A Canadian expat who writes the excellent Living in Egypt blog recently summed up local food in a comment on my blog:

Most of the mezze dishes in Egyptian restaurants are vegetarian, such things as cheese with tomato, aubergines fried or pickled, bessara (a pate of fava beans served cold with friend onions on top), and so on. That’s because the traditional cooking is and was vegetarian with meat being something only eaten once a week. The basic food of Egypt is foul and taameya, which provides much of the population with its ‘go’.

We came across all the dishes Maryanne recommends during our stay in Egypt, although it was easier to find good, local restaurants in Cairo than in smaller places that cater predominantly for tourists, such as Luxor.

One of the more interesting dishes we tried was bessara. This is a pureed form of the spiced beans used in taminya .

However, go upmarket (and / or to a tourist restaurant) and the vegetarian options will dwindle at the same rate as the cash in your wallet.

A typical Egyptian restaurant catering to tourists will have a salad section of the menu, a main section of the menu, and dessert. Some will also have a “vegetable” or “side dish” section.

Salad is a potentially misleading category for Westerners travelling in the Middle East. Most “salad” dishes are actually dips, usually baba ghanouj (served creamy here), tahini, cheese and tomato (the pink dip in the above photo) and maybe yoghurt with cucumber pieces.

If you prefer a salad which is fresh and green, the safest bet is an “oriental salad” which is finely diced cucumber and tomato pieces, often with a lemon dressing.

The mains section of the menu in a tourist restaurant is usually a hopeless cause for vegetarians. Slide your finger along the list of kebabs and meat stews, and you might be lucky enough to find a vegetable casserole.

This is sometimes called moussaka or Egyptian moussaka, and occasionally just “vegetable”. This is a pretty reliable, and generally tasty dish. It has a tomato base, and the vegetables in it include potato, eggplant and zucchini, though these vary. (The cheese and tomato decoration in the picture above are unusual, but unfortunately most restaurants were “atmospherically” lit and my more authentic photos didn’t turn out).

It is not unusual for this to be the only vegetarian choice on the mains / side dish section - although in one restaurant in Aswan we found about three - four vegetable side dishes (each in the same tomato sauce, but with only a single type of vegetable per dish).

In tourist places catering for a more alternative crowd (i.e. Dahab) most restaurants have a vegetarian section on their menu, and will offer three - four choices. The moussaka here is usually good. Some of the others… not so much.

Fortunately, one area where even Egyptian tourist restaurants can’t go too far wrong is dessert. The most ubiquitous dish is called Om Ali, which is pastry cooked with cream (I thought it was like bread and butter pudding). While not the most attractive dish in the world, it tastes homely and definitely fills a hole.

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