Engezni Koshary Festival

Billed as Egypt's biggest food festival, the Engezni Koshary Festival in Cairo brings together around 100 restaurants for a celebration built entirely around the country's most beloved comfort dish. Koshary, a hearty combination of rice, lentils, chickpeas, pasta and crispy fried onions, topped with a tangy tomato and garlic sauce, holds a genuinely unique place in Egyptian food culture as a dish that transcends class, found equally on street corners and in upscale restaurants across the country.

The festival's centrepiece is a genuinely spectacular feat of cooking: a Guinness World Record-breaking plate of koshary measuring 10 metres wide and 1.2 metres high, weighing over 8,000 kilograms, enough to feed thousands of visitors in a single sitting. Beyond the record-breaking dish itself, the festival gives visitors the chance to sample koshary from across Cairo's culinary scene, comparing the subtle variations different restaurants bring to a dish most Egyptians consider distinctly their own.

For a country whose cuisine draws on Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and African influences in roughly equal measure, koshary stands out as a dish with a genuinely distinct identity, and Cairo's festival offers the single most concentrated, celebratory way to experience it — a Guinness World Record and a national comfort food, served up together.