Mahmoud Antaki, founder and head chef at Ministry of Meat: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Mahmoud Antaki, the founder and head chef at Ministry of Meat, which makes the best beef bacon we’ve had anywhere.

My name is Mahmoud Antaki, and I'm the founder and head chef at Ministry of Meat. At the age of 18, I left Egypt and moved to Miami to pursue a degree in strategic management. Because I couldn't work on a student visa, I had to get an under-the-table type job at a restaurant. I started out as a server, but I quickly realized that I loved the energy in the kitchen — what we call the back of the house — way more than the front of the house. The back of the house was a combination of big dudes, ex-cons, and really good cooks. Lots of cursing, too. So I was like, “Sign me up here! What’ve I gotta do?”

I went to culinary school in California after eight years in Miami. I was doing pretty well and one of the chefs sent me to a Michelin-starred restaurant to get a stage — an internship for chefs. I worked with an incredible chef called Raphael Lunetta, a French-American surfer who taught me pretty much everything I know.

I lived and cooked in Peru and Argentina for a few years. In 2011, I headed off to Peru and spent two years playing the flute, meditating, and learning the cuisine. But it was in Buenos Aires that I really understood why Argentina is the barbecue capital of the world, not Texas. In Argentina, I got to understand what meat is and it totally changed my perspective on what barbecuing is. I also learned that it’s best to cook from what you can find in your backyard. Why would I cook saumon fumé in Egypt, for example? Why not go to the Nile River, catch me a couple of tilapias and make something with that? So that’s what I did when I moved to Aswan.

I returned to Egypt when I was 37. Before settling in Cairo, I spent two years on a small island called Heissa in Aswan and opened a small restaurant. But I was faced with a challenge: How do you come to a land that's not yours, surrounded by poor Nubian people, and just start making money like that? It seemed inappropriate. So I started thinking about how I could involve and benefit the community. I asked the families around me to make certain items on the menu. The women would cook and send the food down to the restaurant, and I would pay for it. And because guests could only come to the restaurant by boat, the fishermen were involved too. I made some ceviche from the native tilapia that drove people crazy. I had all sorts of people coming in — actors, writers, gurus, and even Dr. Magdi Yacoub.

I was mind-boggled by why Cairo doesn’t have decent sausages or hot dogs, like the Bratwurst that you get in Zurich — those nice, juicy, popping sausages. So when the pandemic hit, my wife and I created Ministry of Meat. I bought cooking equipment and started smoking sausages on my roof and my wife did the social media and organized deliveries. We started delivering to our neighbors, then to expats in Maadi, and now to everyone with our new central kitchen. One day, I’d love to open a factory for mass production so that we can export our meats to the world.

Ministry of Meat does things a little differently: Our business addresses the scarcity of clean meat. Our meat doesn’t have fillers, soybean, or gluten. It's not manufactured food. It's 100% pure meat.

Striking a good work–life balance was hard at the beginning because I'm not your average nine-to-five person. I’m something of a free soul and used to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to before starting my business. But having the right partner in life and business, my wife, helped me to achieve a balance.

If there's no Miles Davis in the morning, it’s a bad omen. I wake up around 6:30-7:00 am with the kids and put on some Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Then I fix my coffee and sit with the kids before their mom gets them dressed and drops them off at the nursery. My children Ismail and Selim are my best friends in the world. They’re like two little gangster hustlers.

I unwind after work by either playing with my kids or working on music production. I have a studio downstairs where I play my flutes, put on some loops, and record (Soundcloud). And sometimes I play the keyboard or the piano. I put my headphones on and I'm just disconnected from the world for a couple of hours.

I love it when the people I supervise do it better than me — it means I'm doing my job right. My right-hand man, Otdb, is one of the best cooks I've ever met. You show him one time how it's done and halfway through he says, “Khalas, I know.” Then the next day he makes it better than you.

Eventually, I’d like to go live on a farm somewhere. I would take my wife and kids and we’d just build a small shed, have some animals, farm and eat what we plant, and live on the land. I’ve been looking at options in Thailand and Sri Lanka. First we have to work the financial aspect out as well as make sure the kids can go to school. It’s my ultimate dream.

‘Don’t copy anyone’ and ‘create a place where people want to work’ are the two bits of advice I’d give to anyone who plans to start a business.

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