In conversation with Lulu’s Kitchen’s Alia El Askalany

A taameya sandwich can tell you quite a lot about Alia El Askalany. For a pop-up in Beirut, the chef who goes by ‘Lulu’ took its familiar ingredients — fava beans, tahini, vegetables, herbs, and toasted sesame — and turned them into a salad. It’s a perfect expression of what she does at Lulu’s Kitchen: Start with something rooted in memory and tradition, take it somewhere unexpected, and invite people to the table.

That table moves around. Sometimes it’s a pop-up lunch at an aquaponic farm. Sometimes it is a supper club in Athens or a culinary retreat in Sicily. El Askalany is a chef, consultant, food writer, and olive oil sommelier whose work crosses Egypt, Greece, and Italy. She splits her time between Egypt and Greece, where her husband is from, and is developing a business in which cooking, teaching, travel, and storytelling feed into one another.

She takes her work seriously, and it shows. El Askalany doesn’t need to stage fancy tablescapes in opulent settings; instead, she is focused on using fresh, quality ingredients to cook intentional, unpretentious dishes, and her tables are often found in lush natural settings. Owning a restaurant has crossed her mind, but it’s not where she wants to be at the moment. “I thought about it, but maybe the food that I serve to people on culinary retreats and pop-up dinners is my restaurant,” she tells EnterpriseAM.

Her journey started at home

Long before El Askalany became a chef, she grew up with strong food traditions. She loved to watch her mother and aunts — university professors whose disciplines included English literature and architecture — cook and host with an attention to detail that extended from seasonal ingredients to presentation. “My family is from Alexandria, so we had that extra Mediterranean twist; everything was thought-out, cooked with a lot of love and soul, what we call ‘naffas,’” El Askalany tells us.

Food wasn’t her first career. “I studied advertising and PR, completed a master’s at Middlesex University, and worked in communications, including a stint on El Gouna’s marketing team. From there, I moved into marketing for the restaurant Casper & Gambini’s,” says El Askalany. This brought her closer to kitchens, so when she was laid off in 2013 as that business started to wind down, she took the time to explore her interest in food.

In 2014, she went to Le Cordon Bleu in London for an intensive three-month advanced kitchen techniques course. “I came back to Cairo and launched Lulu’s Kitchen as a cooking school in a rented apartment in Zamalek. There wasn’t really anything like it at the time. Friends brought friends. People cooked, sat down, and ate together. They came to forget the outside world and become immersed in something different,” she recalls.

The classes led to a second line of work: Clients began asking her to develop menus and recipes and to train kitchen teams. Culinary consultancy remains part of her business today. “Building Lulu’s Kitchen has required an eye for branding, a clear voice, and the ability to explain what makes an experience worth seeking out. I think this is where my communications background has really helped out,” El Askalany says.

Discovering the Mediterranean

Further training at the Florence Culinary Arts School helped shape her approach to hosting. “I was inspired by those long tables and generous banquets in Tuscany, and I wanted to recreate some of that in Egypt,” she says. In 2018, she was one of the first chefs in Egypt to organize ticketed pop-up dinners in borrowed spaces, from rooftops to clubhouses, changing the menu each time. Guests might encounter Italian food one weekend, French or Spanish another. “These were much more low-key affairs than a lot of what we see today. Social media wasn’t very developed, so people found out about the events through word of mouth,” explains El Askalany.

Her interests began shifting toward what happens before ingredients reach the kitchen, so she went back to school. In early 2020, she joined Cook the Farm, an immersive agro-culinary program in Sicily that focused on farming, sourcing, and seasons. But pandemic shutdowns cut the course short and sent her home.

Sicily was transformative. “One of the things that happened while I was there was a deepened interest in olive oil. Being in Sicily also made me realize that there are connections between Mediterranean food cultures that I wanted to explore,” El Askalany tells us. Her cooking increasingly brought Egyptian ingredients and ideas into conversation with Greek and Italian traditions.

Sommelier with a different specialty

Olive oil became a serious discipline. Encouraged by a tutor from Sicily, El Askalany trained with ONAOO (the Italian organization of olive oil tasters) in 2022 and completed a two-year advanced course. “Every month we would receive a box of eight samples for blind taste-testing sessions followed by a webinar with participants from around the world,” says El Askalany.

The combination of chef and olive oil sommelier is unique in Egypt. It has given her another avenue for consultancy with local olive oil manufacturers and educational workshops, and it has changed how she builds a menu. “An oil’s flavor becomes a starting point for a pairing: something softer and sweeter might suit a dessert, while a greener, fruitier oil can complement cheese or dips,” El Askalany explains. “It changed the way I cook and the way I taste.”

Finding her voice

The food scene is growing fast — maybe too fast. “Naturally, some things survive and some things fall. I don’t mean that negatively. There are a lot of great things going on,” says El Askalany. She believes that ultimately people are now searching for community, sourcing, and storytelling, which you don’t necessarily find in a conventional restaurant where things tend to be fast-paced and impersonal. “People want something curated that they can relate to. The businesses or brands that have a story to tell, and something authentic and consistent to offer, are the ones that will survive.”

Egypt still lacks chef-led restaurants. “Traditionally in Egypt, the person with the money opens a restaurant and brings in a chef to run it for them. I think this is changing, because a lot of young people are now studying culinary arts inside Egypt and outside, and some of those aspiring chefs have both the management and the cooking know-how,” says El Askalany.

The market has advanced a lot. “Chefs are getting introduced to farms: they are educating themselves on the seasonality of hydroponic and aquaponic vegetables, for example. They are more involved with sourcing, which is creating new [prospects] for specialty growers and small farms. I also like the fact that you can find everything locally sourced and locally grown,” El Askalany tells us.

Closer to the source

El Askalany’s next chapter combines travel and teaching. A consultancy with Nawaya, a women’s community kitchen in Abu Sir that works with rural women on how to present traditional country food to tourists, sparked an interest in gastro-tourism.

Her first culinary trip took a group of Egyptian women to India. In Sicily, she later collaborated on an eight-woman olive harvest and culinary retreat. Now she is bringing that approach to Egypt. A December retreat planned at Ardi in Dahshur will accommodate just 10 guests, with cooking, new-harvest olive oil tasting, and time to slow down. “I’d like to develop more trips in Greece and across Egypt, going beyond Cairo to places like Fayoum, Sinai, and Aswan,” says El Askalany.

A book is on the way. El Askalany has been working on a cookbook manuscript that follows her childhood memories and development as a chef, connecting Egypt, Italy, and Greece through food, seasons, and hospitality. She hopes to publish within the next two years and uses her Substack, where she generally publishes twice a month, as a “writing lab.”

For Lulu, the ambitions ahead also include a hospitality project in Greece and perhaps even her own olive oil brand. The precise shape of Lulu’s Kitchen is still evolving, but it will surely include good ingredients, thoughtful cooking, and the feeling of being welcomed to someone’s table.