ZOOBA | THE GRAND EGYPTIAN MUSEUM
An Interactive Culinary Cultural Experience
Year: 2023
Location: Giza, Egypt
Project Team: Ahmed ElHusseiny, Principal - Edson Pinto, Design Lead - Timothy Khalifa, Project Architect
Zooba GEM is a flagship branch of the celebrated Egyptian food brand located at the new Grand Egyptian Museum.
The restaurant occupies a generous corner location, prominently positioned along the museum's soaring main atrium and directly overlooking the main visitor’s entrance and the timeless historic artifacts that occupy the atrium and stepped galleries beyond.
Zooba GEM offers many of the museum's visitors their first and best opportunity to sample high quality, authentic Egyptian cuisine in a unique, refined, and characterful setting. Informed and inspired by the museum setting, AE Superlab chose to approach the design as an interactive food experience, educating and informing visitors of the rich and inexorable connections that bind Egyptian food, culture, and history while offering them the opportunity to experience and enjoy the contemporary product of that culinary and cultural history in Zooba’s award-winning food.
In developing the design, a key challenge was marrying the brand's exuberant street-inspired visual and spatial identity (most recently redeveloped by &Walsh for print and media, and by AE Superlab for interior architecture and design) with the more monumental and tonally subtle aesthetic of the museum itself. The design needed to simultaneously remain true to the Zooba brand and capitalize on the unique scale and monumentality of its setting while also maintaining a respectful deference to the design of the museum and to the history and culture it represents.
In response, the design team opted to strip back the design language that they had previously developed for the brand to its structural, and spatial basics. Namely, the conceit of the individual stalls, kiosks, and makeshift shelters within an imagined Egyptian streetscape. Four primary functional zones were identified and each was housed in a self-contained station within the larger restaurant space. The positioning of these stations against a stone clad wall evokes the stalls and kiosks lining the exterior walls of ancient buildings throughout medieval Cairo, while the alternating light and dark granite courses playfully evoke the “Ablaq” walls of those medieval structures.
Between the stations the team inserted bright yellow, full-height, perforated steel panels. These panels indicate and provide a unified backdrop for all textual information conveyed within the space, be it a detailed history of bread-making in Egypt throughout the eras or the main restaurant menu boards. The bright yellow hue of the panels was carefully selected to reference historical hues used in ancient Egyptian art and architecture, while the perforation provides a lightness and slight transparency to the panels.
Egyptian iconography from various historical and contemporary eras is playfully abstracted and juxtaposed throughout the space in numerous custom fabricated elements including latticework screens (mashrabiyyas), laser-etched steel tabletops, and upcycled industrial mesh lightboxes. All of the disparate elements are visually tied together by a series of strong datums which dictate an organizing spatial hierarchy, and by a focused, unified material palette that is occasionally punctuated by elements of exuberant “Zooba color”.
