-metry

When Ayob Metry and Nadia Gomaa worked together in the prepared foods department at Whole Foods in Ashburn, they would regularly challenge each other to see who could make the best koshary, that carb-heavy bowl of elbow pasta, vermicelli, black lentils, white rice, chickpeas and fried onions somehow held together with a slow-cooked tomato sauce with the faintest reverberations of garlic and cumin.

Sometimes Metry’s version won, sometimes Gomaa’s.

As Metry told me one evening on the phone: “We are a kingdom. There is not a king. It’s not only me. It’s not only her. It’s all of us.”

Metry and Gomaa make their own from freshly toasted sesame seeds that are blended with cumin, oil and lemon juice.

Metry and Gomaa come from different parts of Egypt.