Maadi’s Road 233 has been blessed with a new restaurant — a Mongolian eatery named Ghengis Khan. The restaurant is unassuming — white tiled floors and four tables visible from the front window. In the back is a fifth table — a haunt for the restaurant’s regulars and the owners' friends and family. It seems the place is run by two women, both of whom prepare food and simultaneously bustle about serving and dealing with questions often in languages they don’t understand.
You’ll find that those working in the restaurant speak Arabic better than they speak English, although the menu is written both in Mandarin and in English. You can order by number as well and the list is pretty extensive.
The servings are generous — the garlic beef and cucumber salads easily served the seven people at our table and were delicious. Neither was painfully spicy but both were rich with flavor.
Our main courses varied from fried noodles to kung pao chicken, beef with onions and twice-cooked chicken (sweet and sour). The kung pao was a little spicy, the noodles delicious, but don’t order one per person, both rice and noodles come in a full dinner plate serving and are enough for two or even three.
The beef with onions was the table favorite for main courses, with the twice-cooked, crunchy sweet-and-sour chicken a close second.
With an adventurous spirit, we ordered what seems to be the restaurant’s specialty — a large soup bowl with your choice of ingredients — prawns, fish, black mushrooms, etc. The soup can be ordered spicy, mild or “half-half,” which is literally a yin-yang shaped bowl, half of which houses spicy soup and half of which houses the mild.
Although the soup seems to be a favorite with the restaurant’s regulars, I found the fish and prawns cooked in either soup to be nicely flavored but not as delicious as the rest of the meal.
With five main dishes, three noodles and three rices, and our yin-yang half-and-half soup, the seven of us paid 70 LE each. You can bring your own wine, although the restaurant serves beer.
