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

The healthy eating trend, make no mistake it is in fact a trend, has taken Cairo by storm. Every neighbourhood now has some sort of salad bar and/or diet-friendly restaurants catering almost exclusively to the people willing to sacrifice flavour for less calories.

We say it’s a trend because the last few trends before it were all sweets and confectionary items. Before the healthy eating trend hit the capital though, perhaps a decade before that, the original perpetrator of ‘healthy sandwiches’ and practically an icon of the 90’s was Subway.

Famed for their healthy options and tasty sandwiches, Subway were even known for their commercials about weight loss using models who had nothing to do with Subway.

The Maadi branch has been around longer than we can personally remember. Quite modest in size it occupies a corner across from the Duty Free Store and Tabla Luna.

Sporting the original sandwich bar layout, this particular branch hasn’t been renovated in quite some time. You’ll never find it particularly crowded either.

Opting for a Steak and Cheese Foot Long (49LE) as well as a Chicken Parmesan Foot Long (47LE) we watched the pleasant servers put our sandwiches together in the types of bread of our choosing. We opted for Sesame and Parmesan Oregano accordingly.

To top the meats off, we also requested tomatoes, lettuce and sweet onion dressing on the first sandwich, and pickles on the second.

The Steak and Cheese, while sufficiently stuffed with meat, wasn’t very filling. The flavours were decent but we do remember tasting better. The Chicken Parmesan was a complete miss. Made with frozen pre-cooked chicken breasts—the stuff that’s called chicken but barely resembles it, that wasn’t even fried properly. The rest of the toppings were quite scarce leaving much to be desired from this sandwich.

Sorely disappointing without much of a dining experience to salvage it, were surprised what keeps Subway going here in Cairo. The standard is definitely not what it used to be, the sandwiches just aren’t the same, and the competition is much stronger than what it used to be in their field.