Koshari Street is food to revolutionise the West End

The street food that helped bring down Hosni Mubarak has arrived in the West End. A carb-tastic combination of rice, pasta and lentils, topped with tomato sauce and fried onions, Koshari is the unofficial Egyptian national dish that supposedly kept fire in the bellies of Cairo’s Tahrir Square demonstrators in 2011. Koshari Street on St Martin’s Lane, a takeaway with only a few stools at a single narrow bench for eating at, is admittedly more likely to fuel tourists, theatregoers and office workers than bring about regime change. With its smart purple branding and emphasis on healthy eating, it comes across like a bijou branch of Leon goes to Cairo. The learned Lebanese-born, London-based cookery writer Anissa Helou has consulted on the simple menu built around her take on koshari. It’s made with Spanish rice and lentils, macaroni and vermicelli, topped with chickpeas (meat toppings such as lamb may follow), a choice of three spice grades (‘mild’, ‘hot’ and ‘mad’) of tomato sauce and sweet crispy caramelised onions. by metro