The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

There are many places in Cairo that attempt to become a place to hang out and have a drink, while simultaneously offering restaurant-level food. While some succeed with flying colours, others fail spectacularly. Spaces is one of those restaurants that tried to do it all, but it didn’t really go well.

When we first tried Spaces, their food was quite special. They worked very hard to accommodate their customers’ needs and even offered blankets in the winter for their rather cold guests. Spaces also provide a huge portable power bank for its customers so they could charge their Android or iOS phones.

After some time away from Spaces, we decided to see how well it has been doing. We ordered the Mix Grill (120 EGP), which comes as two pieces of each of the following: kofta, grilled chicken, and shish tawook. To our surprise, we couldn’t even differentiate between the shish tawook and kofta, which should be quite an easy task. Moreover, there was no grilled chicken. Their imported meat was of the lowest quality and tasted quite bad. We asked the chef to take it back and tweak it but to no avail, his attempts made no difference to the taste and we decided on leaving it as is.

Our other order was the Negresco Pasta (55 EGP) which should be quite easy to make. Unfortunately, it was even worse than the Mix Grill dish. The mushroom and chicken were very undercooked and tasted a bit stale, plus the pasta itself wasn’t even that well-cooked. We fought through eating half of it, but then decided to give up.

Thankfully, our final order did not disappoint. We ordered Spicy Chicken Strips (42 EGP), which tasted quite good, and was worth the wait as they were a bit late in serving it. The only problem is that it wasn’t as spicy as we ordered.

Finally, the drinks; we ordered a Lemon Mint Smoothie (30 EGP) plus a Mango Smoothie (35 EGP). We advise you all to try their refreshing drinks and smoothies, because these were actually good, whereas the food was a sheer disappointment and a complete waste of money.

Before we left, we asked the waiter to take away the plates because they destroyed our appetite, and his only concern was that we’d pay for them, rather than seeing what went wrong. He did ask us to come back so they could compensate us for this disappointing meal with a good one.