Community Highlights: Meet Ragab Rashwan of King Tut’s

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ragab Rashwan.

Hi Ragab, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
What’s the best part of a city? The movement, the energy, meeting every kind of person imaginable.

I left my family and village before adolescence and went looking for economic opportunity in Cairo. Sure, there was work there. But the real bonus was a thousand friendships, million stories, and countless new ideas swirling around this city, equal parts old and new, Egyptian and cosmopolitan. And all these people rubbed shoulders where? The coffeeshop. My downtown coffeeshop was small and plain on the outside but nicknamed the United Nations because I served everyone from local shopkeepers to backpackers to celebrities and diplomats.

At some point, I started inviting the neighboring shopkeepers who had become friends to share the lunches I cooked for myself while I worked. In Egypt, you’re obliged to say “Itfadl” if anyone sees you eating, “Please, help yourself to some food.” Then I started inviting my customers to eat so they could stay and continue their conversations. I even offered to feed this one grimy yet charming American lady.

Fast forward, one love story and one national revolution later, I’m getting on my feet working a halal food cart in New York City. New York City! The buzz! The excitement! Yet more interesting people to connect with! What an education, yet I longed to have a space away from a midtown sidewalk where customers and friends could come sit and unwind. I missed my coffeeshop.

Fast forward, one food truck adventure and two kids later, I opened King Tut’s on Nolensville Pike, the most eclectic and exciting culinary corridor in Nashville — yet another gloriously dynamic and welcoming city. And I’m honored to be part of the fabric of this city, one of many immigrants sharing their food, culture, and stories. I’m so grateful to this city for letting me cook the recipes I love — my own little take on Mediterranean — and indulging me when I insist on doing everything from scratch.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Has it been a smooth road? Are you kidding??!!

Having a small business in the US is not for the faint of heart. One the one hand, there are all these rules and forms and taxes that I never had to deal with in Egypt. On the other hand, you are getting squeezed financially by the giant corporations that are your credit card payment processors, your ordering and delivery middlemen, even your food and packaging suppliers. Small restaurants like mine make more profit for those corporations than we do for ourselves.

When I ran my coffeeshop in Egypt, there wasn’t that kind of market concentration. Oh, and huge companies here are also competing head to head with you in the restaurant business. But thank God, “el-Hamdullilah” as we say, the business is surviving. And a big thanks to our fabulous customers.

And then there are all the very specific things that can go wrong with a food truck, like broken transmissions on the way to a catering job, getting stuck in the mud at a music festival, and – yes, once, – having a fire break out in the kitchen while driving on the interstate.

Life is never boring for sure! But, knock on wood, we have had fewer dramatic incidents since opening the fixed restaurant location.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We’re an unpretentious eatery serving up fresh Mediterranean dishes made from scratch.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Everything evolves so fast around us, most of us can only return to the world of our childhoods in our minds.

My childhood was a fantastical one, one with near constant adventure and companionship. A swarm of vegetable-thieving cousins and myself would raid our relatives’ garden plucking out nature’s treasures from their hiding spots, absconding with a prize watermelon, pulling fish with our bare hands from the muddy bottoms of irrigation canals, sneaking duck eggs from the banks of the Nile, shimmying up date palms in the early morning hours, leaping to and from passing big rigs to toss a few stalks of sugar cane down to the smaller children in the road.

Not surprising for someone who enjoys cooking for a living, but many of my childhood memories revolve food. How the eggplants in my village were mild enough to eat directly off the plant, the smell of buried peanuts roasting in the hot sand, the mellow warm taste of water buffalo cheese fried in a clay dish. We may have been income poor, but we sure were flavor rich. And we had each other, a community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kingtutsnashville.com
• Instagram: kingtutsnashville
• Facebook: kingtutsnashville