Oh boy! If my 40th birthday didn’t make me feel old enough already, that 8th Mido Eats anniversary sure did. I don’t want to start with the Oscars intro of “It has been an incredible 8 years… Bla, bla, bla..”, because of course they were quite eventful years! The moments of growth and the milestones of maturity along that time of my life is the true highlight.

When I started my blog in 2013 I wasn’t in the best phase of my life. I had just closed down my restaurant and thrown away the opportunity of reopening it in the foreseeable future. But I wanted to stay in food somehow. I wanted to pass on the knowledge I had collected and educate Egyptian eaters about food. In order for any chance of my voice being heard, I thought I’d create this blog and start writing.

Back then I was an anonymous food critic. I would go to restaurants, order some interesting dishes and go back home and write a full review about my experience. It was great fun because I love to write (and eat), but the inner attention whore was not fully satisfied just yet. Thanks to many notable media platforms in Egypt, especially CairoScene and CairoZoom, my face slowly became recognized and the “anonymous” critic idea took on a different from. I started to create more content around the social food scene in Egypt and eventually I was getting invited to tasting and opening events of Egypt’s biggest restaurants up to 2 or 3 a day every day! At some point, it started to feel meaningless.. Thanks to constant mentorship and guidance from best friend and fashion photographer Abdallah Rushdi, I realized that a lot of the food and event setups became obnoxiously repetitive and there was absolutely no innovation or quality content for all the wonderful people that had started to follow me on social media.

When Covid came and ruined our lives, I was one of the people that actually couldn’t have been happier to be locked down at home. I finally got a good chance to start using that new DSLR camera that I had bought a couple of months earlier. The discovery of my passion for food photography and styling was an absolutely stunning eye opener! This is it! This is what I want to do forever and ever…!

Today, I look back and realize how profoundly this blog has evolved over time. I hope I can continue to produce content that is worthy of my followers investment of time and interest in me. 🙏🏽

Even through the many shapes and forms that Mido Eats has taken, I have never veered from my original mission. I still try to offer educational content to my followers but this time it’s through innovation and art and words.