While Cairo’s best season of the year starts, autumn’s light breeze, slight freshening cold would not get any better without a mouth-watery, fresh Italian food at a place overviewing the Nile. At Garden City’s Intercontinental Semiramis, Italian cuisine served at its best at Pane Vino restaurant and cafe.
The second-floor restaurant provides visitors one of a kind food experience, not only for the capturing view of the Nile and the city, but as it takes you in time and place to Italy’s elite eateries with nothing but luscious baking smell and pasta’s various choices of types and sauces.
The place’s interior design is all about wood and brown colour, which gives you the feeling of warmth, cosiness, yet the giant windows overviewing the blur river’s cruises creates the feeling of width and relief.
Pane Vino, literally translated into bread and wine, is all about bakeries. With a wood stove located in the middle area of the restaurant, the fresh, crusty, fluffy complimentary was the perfect start of a following, satisfying various plates.
Consisting of bâton salé and mini sized stuffed bread, served with olive paste, the welcoming compliment was considered one of the best plates of the meal. The fresh dough is fluffy, freshly baked and moist.
For the main course, we ordered the most requested plates, according to the waiter, which are Linguine Al Frutti Di Mare, misto di mare alla griglia, and cotoletta alla milanese.
Inguine Al Frutti Di Mare was officially named the best plate of the evening. The huge pasta plate is served with red sauce, calamari, shrimps, salmon, and sea bass garlic. The pasta was well-cooked, and the sauce was the star of the table. Very balanced in sourness and sweet and the thickness, the red sauce’s texture was perfect. As for the sea food, the shrimps and calamari were seasoned and cooked enough, unlike most of the similar plates, in which the seafood is overly cooked to the extent of losing their shapes.
Overall, the plate was actually one of the best pastas the team ever had, and the most recommended plate in the restaurant.
Misto di mare alla griglia came as our second favourite plate. The grilled sea bass, salmon, shrimps, and calamari were garlic flavoured and served with rice and grilled vegetables.
The seasoning of the plate was intense, yet the garlic provided an extremely mouth watery smell for the plate. The moistness of salmon and calamari was unbelievable as they melted in mouth. With the taste of the grill burn, they brought together a well-balanced, must try plate.
As for the cotoletta alla milanese, it was extremely large in portion, filled with pan fried veal fillet that was served with salad.
The veal was crispy from the outside and moist from inside. The light brown veal pieces were well cooked from all sides, however, if you are an intense-flavour fan, make sure to request seasoning the fillet before frying them.
For the dessert, we went for pistachio-flavoured panna cotta, which was also the perfect conclusion of one fulling experience of Italy’s most popular dishes.
The panna cotta was creamy, yet light with an overcoming taste of pistachio. It is quite recommended as a sharing desert after the totally fulling food amount.
The high-end eatery offers its visitors both indoor and outdoor areas, with the availability of shisha and eastern drinks art the outdoor area. As for the prices, the place is considered one of the high-cost restaurants in the city, but totally worth it for the service, view and delicious food.
