Sphinx Egyptian Kitchen

🇪🇬 EGYPT / In an unlikely plaza at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, an ode to the streets of Giza and Cairo is now alive in Glendora.

🇪🇬 EGYPT
📍 1311 S. Grand Avenue,
Glendora, San Gabriel Valley.
🅿️ Ample parking in plaza
🥤 No Alcohol
🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

📸 All photos by Jared Cohee
for Eat the World Los Angeles

If you have just hopped off the 210 and are cruising down Grand Avenue, you could be forgiven for not having your world foods radar tuned to the plaza that calls itself Glendora Promenade. With mostly non-food neighbors and in the exact spot a Subway and a restaurant mind-bogglingly named Flavor Season, a new Egyptian street food spot has magically come into existence in late 2023.

Feeter seems to be an Egyptian specialty that continues to enlarge its footprint in Greater Los Angeles, but Sphinx goes far beyond. They offer everything you might see on the streets of Cairo and all of its alleys the sun goes down and delicious foods become available. While eating on the street is not really part of Egyptian culture as it is in other places, you can always see packages of food being exchanged for money, customers loading up from specialists of each item to take home.

Since opening in September, decor is so far limited to a Cleopatra bust, a model of the Sphinx, and the black, white, and red of the Egyptian flag hanging from the wall. The effort has been thoroughly concentrated in the kitchen, with wonderful recipes and execution by the couple that runs the new spot. Curious local customers might come in for familiar shawerma wraps and falafel, but be prepared to dig deeper into the Egyptian specialties rarely seen in town outside of Anaheim’s Little Arabia.

The menu reads as if you were out with friends stopping at all your favorite restaurant stalls, so bring at least a couple others so you can have a table full of as many treasures as can fit. “Coming soon” is still written on the menu next to the molokhia ($4.99, below lower right corner), a fragrant and slimy soup of jute leaves. It is a thorough contrast in flavors, at the same time bitter and deeply rich. Thankfully soon is now.

Sphinx is a great place to try a special Egyptian oddity known as koshari ($13.99, above center bottom and below), which the restaurant calls the national dish. In the mid-1800's, Egypt was doing quite well economically and even the cabinets of lower classes of people were filled with various ingredients from various places. Koshari became a way to use all of these ingredients in one dish, and is now as popular in Egypt as anything else associated with Egyptian cuisine.

With a bed of rice, lentils, chickpeas, and macaroni pasta, it is topped with a tomato sauce and fried onions, perfect for the vegans in your group. Roadside stalls serving only versions of this dish are very common in Egypt, but you can also find it on menus in more formal restaurants. If you are in a pasta mood when you visit, you can also get another favorite called macarona baschamel which has penne, ground beef, and the namesake white sauce.