At a restaurant in Cairo, strips of beef are laid across a hot grill, the fat beginning to hiss almost immediately. Zhang Yu watches closely. He notices the color, the smoke, the timing. For a moment, the vice-president of Egypt Dongbei Chamber of Commerce and chairman of Lucky House Chinese Restaurant, looks less like a businessman and more like a man checking dinner at home.
The restaurant has become the first authorized overseas outlet of authentic Qiqihar barbecue from Zhang's hometown in Heilongjiang province. For Zhang, that distinction matters.
"Qiqihar barbecue is well-known across China," he says. Extending its overseas presence to Egypt, he believes, means something "far beyond the restaurant itself". He talks about beef from the black soil of Qiqihar, about marinating and grilling, about recipes passed through families for generations. He talks about these things with the precision of someone who has spent much of his adult life around kitchens.
This is Zhang's 26th year in Egypt. Years ago, he had arrived as an international student wanting to study Arabic. But after finishing his studies, he chose to stay on — to build a "Chinese dream" of his own. He learned to cook, became a chef, and eventually took up a job as an executive chef at a US company. After years with the company, he decided to open a restaurant of his own. In the early days, the business and his family life were almost indistinguishable: Zhang worked in the kitchen, his wife managed the front desk, and together they kept the place running. It has since grown into a chain of authentic Chinese restaurants, recognized by Egypt's Chinese community and Egyptians alike.
The menu was assembled partly from memory: crispy sweet and sour pork, northeastern mixed stew, boiled beef, tiger salad and spicy tofu. For Chinese expatriates, the dishes offered something that restaurants often promise but rarely fully deliver — the feeling of having briefly gone somewhere else without leaving town.
The restaurant soon acquired another function. New arrivals from China came asking about apartments, suppliers and paperwork. Students came to talk. People who had lost luggage or documents sometimes appeared at the door. Zhang helped when he could. He had learned something about the fragility of life.
In early 2011, during Egypt's upheaval, also called the "Arab Spring", Zhang was working at a hotel when the unrest intensified. The company suspended food-and-beverage operations and advised employees to stay indoors. Zhang's child was only a few months old.
One day, he went across Cairo's downtown with a Filipino colleague to retrieve the colleague's child, who had gone to take piano lessons and got stranded. The streets, Zhang remembers, looked "like a battlefield". On another trip to help Chinese compatriots, a vehicle carrying them was caught in an unrest and somebody shot at a tire. It was, he says, a moment when he confronted death rather than merely hearing about it.
Years later, he watched Once Upon a Time in the Middle East — a Chinese movie, which is known as Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant in Chinese, on the fate of a Chinese chef who goes to work at a Chinese restaurant in the Middle East only to find his fate altered when war breaks out there — twice. A scene in the movie, where people are trying to find their way home during turmoil, reminded him of Cairo in 2011. What moved him was not the violence itself but something quieter: people wanting to get home, eat a meal and resume an ordinary life.
Today, his restaurants serve mainly Chinese and Egyptian customers. He adjusts flavors to local tastes, but draws a line when it comes to Chinese food. Some Egyptian diners who once approached Chinese dishes cautiously now order them with the familiarity of regulars.
The restaurant is planning to host food-and-culture salons, using barbecue to introduce Egyptian visitors to the customs and food traditions of Northeast China. A restaurant, in his experience, can be a place where expatriates find a familiar voice, where strangers become friends, where a foreigner encounters China without having planned to, and where the meaning of peace is reduced to something wonderfully mundane.
The grill crackles. Zhang watches the meat. For a man who once crossed a dangerous Cairo in search of the child of his foreign co-worker, a quiet evening around a table is not an insignificant thing. It is the point.
Editor：Zhou Jinmiao
