Police officer, jilted lover, agricultural engineer, djinn — Mohamed Alazzazy has played a variety of characters on the Egyptian stage and silver screen. Since moving to Philly in 2014, he’s taken on a new role, co-heading Cilantro Mediterranean Cuisine, at 613 S 4th Street, with his wife Dalia Soliman.
It’s a family-run operation; initially by necessity, the couple explained. Sons Eyad and Marawan — 18 and 21, both Muay Thai champions — assist on evenings and weekends while Alazzazy hustles between sous chef, delivery, and procurement roles, along with any other chore he deems too laborious for his wife and kids. The menu is set and prepared by head chef Soliman.
It’s mostly “Middle Eastern-fusion, with an emphasis on Egyptian cuisine,” Soliman, 49, said; traditional dishes she’s given a twist to for American palates.
Standouts, she said, include Cilantro’s vegetarian moussaka, mildly spicy and served with warm pita, and the chicken shawarma, available in sandwiches, platters, or rice bowls (there are also beef and vegan options).
Egyptian national dish koshari — a hearty combination of spiced rice and lentils, chickpeas, and small pasta, topped with a cumin-tomato sauce and fried onions — is a restaurant specialty, as is the hawawshi; a serving of eight hot pita quarters stuffed with spiced ground beef, onions, garlic, and parsley.
Between appetizers like falafel and hummus bowls, and desserts that include baklava and kunafa (shredded phylo dough with sweet cheese), the menu features larger entrees like whole grilled branzino, roasted chicken, and mixed grill platters of lamb chops, chicken, and beef kebabs, available for parties of different sizes.
Currently, the family is putting the finishing touches on an upstairs event space, big enough for 60, where they plan to host everything from graduation and birthday parties to wedding receptions, with buffets set up in the restaurant below. It’s been in the works since Alazzazy and Soliman purchased the building; a wholly unexpected achievement, they said, given the restaurant’s rough start.
With their two sons, Alazzazy and Soliman left Egypt three years into the continuing fallout of the 2011 revolution. “I was resisting [a move] at first,” Alazzazy said. “But we didn’t feel secure anymore.”
With the move, they left stable jobs. Besides an acting career that was beginning to attract starring roles and prominent directors, Alazzazy was also a journalist, heading the airport office for newspaper Al-Osbou (The Week) and covering everything from traveling dignitaries and sports teams to artifacts smuggling and plane crashes.
Soliman had managed her own catering company in Cairo; an extension of her mother’s long-running restaurant — it’s what the ‘since 1974’ on Cilantro’s sign refers to. Settling in the US, she had hoped to pick up where she left off, “but it was too difficult,” she said, initially lacking language skills and local references.
Instead, Soliman found work at a few pizza places and fast-food spots, eventually landing a non-culinary job at Indian Creek Foundation, a non-profit providing disability services in Montgomery County. She began catering again, mostly to Egyptians, but it proved too exhausting to balance with a job that kept her out of the kitchen until evenings.
“I wasn’t thinking of a business at that point,” Soliman said. “I just wanted to work a stable job in a kitchen to build the experience I’d need here.”
The family made a pivot. With acting roles hard to come by in the US and work as a correspondent for Al-Osbou drying up, Alazzazy took on gigs driving for Uber and delivering pizzas while Soliman quit Indian Creek for culinary school.
“I wanted to help her realize her dream,” Alazzazy said. “Dalia’s really talented, and I believed in her.”
Soliman failed her admissions exam for OIC vocational school on Broad, defeated by unfamiliar conversion rates, but her skill was recognized by a chef, she said, who gave her a spot in the program. Upon her graduation, he helped her get a job at now-closed Amis Trattoria, where she progressed from garnisher to making pastries. From there, Soliman went to the Bellevue on Broad, working first in the banquet hall before moving up to the 19th floor fine dining restaurant, XIX, as cook for two years.
The couple came across the S 4th Street storefront — formerly Pakistani spot Kabobeesh but, at the time, vacant — in June 2019 and quickly made a bid. With no money for marketing or additional staff beyond the family, the restaurant eked out its operational costs for eight dire months, and then the pandemic hit.
“We had two choices,” Soliman said. “Either push through [the pandemic] or go out of business and be in debt.”
The family doubled down, taking advantage of the lull in neighborhood competition and staying open for pick up orders, with Alazzazy rushing out deliveries across the city.
“We were suffering, mentally and physically,” Soliman said of the toll. But the effort and subsequent word-of-mouth paid off, the family seeing their first real profit during the pandemic. Business, she said, has been steady since.
With future locations in the works, the couple partially attributes the restaurant’s success so far to the dynamics behind the business; the familial connection makes communication easier, and the investment seem more real, they explained.
“He used to not even know what was in our fridge,” Soliman said of her husband and his career shift. “Now, to see him running the restaurant, it’s kind of a miracle.”
613 S 4th Street | 12 to 11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Friday and Saturday | BYOB | (267) 761-9609
