Restaurant Review: Foda Egyptian Sandwiches in Astoria, Queens – The New York Times

One school of thought on liver holds that it should never be cooked so long that the interior loses all its rosy pink color and fades to dull brown. This view is not likely to be shared by anyone who has eaten kebda Eskandarany, the beef-liver sandwich that has spread from its native Alexandria to souks, street vendors and takeout joints throughout Egypt.

The liver is sliced about as thick as a lasagna noodle before it is blitzed with spices and sautéed. When it leaves the pan it has no pink interior. It has no interior at all, just a front side and a back side, both roughly upholstered in minced garlic, ground chiles, pepper and other spices under a sheen of hot oil. At this point, the liver is stuffed into a slit made in a soft, pale loaf of aish fino, whose fluffy tenderness is somewhere between an Amoroso’s cheese-steak roll and a hot dog bun.

The dish that seems to take longest to prepare, the one responsible for my 20-minute wait times, is koshary, and yet I cannot imagine being in such a rush that I did not have time for Foda’s koshary. Layered over a soft bed of lentils and rice are broken spaghetti strands and short pasta tubes, freshly boiled so they stay firm and don’t clump together. Over this go chickpeas boiled with garlic and finally, a thatch of golden fried onions.

Mr. Foda supplies plastic cups of what he calls garlic sauce — the garlic-infused chickpea water — together with a concentrated, spicy, cumin-scented tomato sauce and a rust-colored oil cooked with ground spices. The rest you do yourself, adding condiments at will and churning the whole mass together.

You can supplement the koshary with fried liver or skinny sections of porphyry-colored, mildly spiced beef sausage. If you eat the whole bowl of starches and legumes on its own, though, there is still a good chance you won’t be hungry again for a considerable time.

What the Stars Mean Because of the pandemic, restaurants are not being given star ratings.