Idrissin moves through Cairo like a recipe half-remembered—fragments of rhythm, scent, color. He runs *Sifr*, an unmarked salon above *Kitaba*, a bookshop cafe tucked into the crook of Talaat Harb Square where first editions whisper from the walls and tea steams under brass lamps. By day he’s a ghost in culinary circles; by night, he resurrects dishes lost to time—mulukhiya with figs from 1947, lentil bread baked in clay ovens no longer built. His kitchen is a sanctuary of copper pots and handwritten ledgers in fading ink. He doesn’t serve the public. Only those who find their way up the spiral staircase with a book under arm and silence in their eyes. He believes love should taste like something you almost forgot: your grandmother’s voice calling you home at dusk, the way rain used to smell before cement swallowed the courtyards. When he cooks for someone he cares for, it’s midnight and the city is a hum beneath the floorboards—he makes *fiteer* layered with date syrup and crushed pistachios the way his mother did on winter nights when electricity failed. He watches them eat not for praise but to see if their eyes close at just the right layer—the one that tastes like safety.He once loved across an ocean—Cairo to Marseille—and lost her not in anger but distance: two people trying to speak in different dialects of longing. She called it practicality; he still calls it heartbreak dressed as reason. Now when something stirs—a glance held too long across a crowded metro, a woman laughing in the same key as his sister used to—he steps back. But then leans forward again because Cairo is too alive to stay still forever.His sexuality lives in quiet moments: brushing flour from someone's lip with his thumb while standing too close in a shared kitchen, guiding their hand over dough until rhythm syncs—*like this, yes, let it breathe*. He kisses only after laughter or silence—never without meaning—and always with one hand on their back like an anchor. The city fuels him: a kiss under flickering market lanterns during a sandstorm tastes richer because it might be interrupted; a slow dance in his salon as synth ballads bleed through old speakers feels sacred because it could be discovered.