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

For those not familiar with it, Yumamia is a local, award-winning catering business that offers homemade food, prepared by home cooks, that’s delivered to your doorstep 24 hours after your order. Although it was a big hit all round, the concept didn’t work for everyone, because it requires big gatherings and ordering a day in advance; but that will no longer be a problem, as Yumamia has launched a new service on their mobile app.

 Yumamia+ is pretty much the same concept, only it offers  single portion meals and delivers in less than 60 minutes. To order the food, all you have to do is choose the Yumamia+ menu on the app – available for Android and iOS – then select the desired items, add your address and mobile number, and finally leave it to the app to keep you up-to-date with the order. What makes this particularly interesting, though, is that the menu consists of six daily rotated items.

Ok, enough with the tech talk – let’s talk about the food. On the day we ordered, the menu had Thousand Island Burger, Buffalo Chicken Sandwich, Grilled Halloumi Salad, Chicken Fattah, Japanese Chicken Katsu, Kofta with Tahini, and a bonus Seyami Vegetable Noodle dish, of which we ordered four.

Starting with the Grilled Halloumi Salad (60LE), it consisted of grilled halloumi – duh – slices of eggplant, lettuce, roasted bell peppers, cherry tomato and a bowl of pomegranate molasses dressing. Despite the watered-down sauce lacking the bold, sweet and tangy flavours one looks for with pomegranate molasses, the ingredients were noticeably crisp and fresh, the portion was huge and the garlic flavour from the eggplant was a particular highlight.

 The second dish we’ve tried was the Chicken Fattah (54LE). With a layer of crispy bread at the bottom, the fluffy yellow basmati rice and slices of perfectly seasoned chicken made for an excellent dish. The amount of yogurt sauce that it comes with was generous and had a delicate garlic flavour, but overall, we loved how this classic dish was very light yet full of flavours. It can also be ordered in a family portion for 185LE. 

Moving to the Japanese Chicken Katsu (54LE), fried chicken is topped with a flavourful Japanese curry sauce, which had a slightly spicy kick to it and a spot-on consistency, plus the crust kept its crispiness and didn’t go soggy. However, we were hoping for more sauce, especially considering that the sautéed vegetables at the bottom were bland and needed something extra. This dish can also be ordered in a family portion for 200LE. 

We also tried the Buffalo Chicken Sandwich (49LE). Once again sauce was the problem; there was scant amount of the buffalo sauce and it was far from spicy as is traditional, but the addition of ranch sauce was on-point, the fried chicken breast had an amazing crunchy crust and the buttered grilled burger bun was fresh and soft.

Overall, despite several of the dishes we tried had small mistakes, the Yumamia+ concept is fantastic. The packaging was safe and sturdy, everything was well presented and it’s a great fast food substitute or office lunch option.