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

Sometimes
it seems that we all want to eat the same food, giving chain restaurants the
opportunity to spread their wings and to kill off hardworking local restaurants
with their overly greasy and fat food; also known as junk food. Sbarro is one
of those chains. What started as a little pizzeria in Brooklyn in the fifties
now is an international brand. Sbarro has several venues all over Cairo,
including a branch in Heliopolis’ Citystars located in Phase 2 behind Ruby
Tuesday and across from El Churro.

You
enter Sbarro through the counter, where you can pick out your dish. You can grab
a combo of a salad and a drink with your main dish. Your main dish can be a
slice of pizza, a serving of pasta or meat with sauce. Yes, Sbarro considers meat
with sauce as a dish on its own.

There are several pizzas to choose from, but as
mentioned earlier you only get a slice. It is best to point out the slice you
want since the pizza is divided rather unfairly, with some slices being half
the size of other slices. Of course we recommend taking the largest slice. After
picking out your pizza, pasta or meat, you can choose from various salads such
as chicken Caesar, coleslaw and mushroom salad among others. After that, choose
your drink and slide through the cash register.

We
sampled the pizza margherita (it is always best to taste the basics) and the
chicken with mushroom cream sauce. For a side dish, we opted for the chicken Caesar
coleslaw salads. We paid 30LE for each combo. The pizza margherita was fine and
indeed better than most pizzas that this reviewer has had in Cairo, but it was
a bit tasteless and could use some serious oregano. The chicken Caesar salad
was really nice except for the croutons that were rather soggy. The dressing
and the chicken were pretty tasty.

The
chicken
mushroom had tasty cooked chicken in it but the sauce was a bit of a
miss as it was too thick, very sour, had a slimy texture and the
mushrooms
obviously were not fresh; in fact they tasted like canned mushrooms.
Furthermore, the coleslaw was too sweet and depressingly drowned in
dressing.

We
actually left hungry after spending 30LE per person, which is quite a shame. For the same amount of money, we
could have had a more substantial meal other fast food chains in
Citystars.