Lou's Food Corner at Amici

And now Amici has Lou. LouLou. Alia Abdelrahman. She’s cool too. And killer. She’s like a killer cocktail and cool vibe on electroshock therapy. I can totally see her as a character in a Tim Burton movie. Or maybe in an adult cartoon. Like Pinky and the Brain. What are we going to do tonight, Brain? The same thing we do every night Pinky. Try and take over the world!

And now, after a couple of one-night stands in Amici’s kitchen, she has decided to partner up permanently with Rawy Rizk and Lilian Hanna to bring her shockingly cool killer cuisine to Amici’s cocktail party.

I passed by her the other night and we hung out for a while so she could tell me all about it …

Part mad scientist, part mad hatter, Alia wants Amici to be a place where you can pass by any time for nibble and bites. A place where you know that even if you walk in alone any night of the week, you’ll find your friends there. Or any afternoon for that matter, cause with Lou’s new menu, they’re going to open earlier so that you can get a head start on the rest of us who hate you because we are still in the office.

The food concept is a simple, straight up, tapas menu: oriental and international. If you’re feeling all nostalgic for Cairo comfort food, she’s bringing the classics in her own style: soguk with a pomegranate syrup; hummus with red pepper; grilled haloumi with sun-dried tomatoes; feta nibbles, sambousak with Philadelphia cream cheese and olives. It’s up to you to figure out which cocktails you want to pair these with.

Alia envisions Amici as a little self-contained society of food and music lovers, people who like to have a drink and chill out, people who if you’re not friends with them already you will want to be. She wants to connect people through her food. She wants the atmosphere to be laid back. Her mission, she says, “Is to spread love through food.”

Perhaps this is why she’s “all about the sauces.” Her plan for world domination is to make people love each other through sharing sauce. Good plan.

The international tapas brings that same home-cooking, comfort feel with Alia’s own personal spin. Fried ravioli, caprese salad skewers, carpaccio, aranchini balls, cheese quesadillas, smoked salmon, mussels: you can’t go wrong.

There are a couple of salads on the menu. One looks particularly intriguing with shrimp, green apples, corn and a dill horseradish sauce. Yay! Sauce! There are a couple of pastas. The faralle with salmon, cheese and capers is looking good to me. And if you are truly famished — or of you need to fortify your stomach for all the killer cocktails that are coming your way — you’ve got the heavy hitters: beef fillet, chicken basil, salmon fillet, shrimp curry.

So, yeah. Amici makes killer cocktails. And Lou makes cool food. And she’s saucy. What’s not to like? It’s a brilliant mashup. After a long day dealing with Cairo, this is definitely where I’ll be heading to mellow my harsh. See you there.