Egypt has a vast selection of street foods. You might opt for a plain baked potato served from an oven on back of a cart, followed by a sticky pastry from the vendor to his right. Or you might head over to a store front to pick up a shawarma - the local variant of gyros or donner kebab, strips of meat shaved off into a pitta and topped with tahina. There are plenty of impromptu juice bars around to supply you with a fresh orange to slake your thirst.
One meal that rapidly became a favourite with me and my friends was koshary (or kushari). This was not something that I had ever come across before, but proved to be cheap, filling, and tasty. It is also free of meat... though whether that means it is 100% suitable for vegetarians is a matter on which I would not like to speculate. Koshary joints are backstreet affairs selling only the one dish.
At its most basic level, koshary is nothing more than a mixture of macaroni, rice, noodles, lentils and onion. Dished out from the one large bowl you are then free to top your meal off with a tomato-ey sauce, chilli sauce, and vinegar. And it is great.
One place I can recommend is an unnamed hole-in-the-wall joint on Ismail Beik Abou El Fettouh Street in Dokki, over on the western bank of the Nile. It was a small place with mirrored walls, four tables, and bad reception on the football. I had two choices - a large bowl or a small bowl. You might as well for the large, as the prices are LE5 and LE3 respectively (equivalent to 50p or 30p in sterling). The grin on the owner's face when we returned the next night was reason enough to return. I got the feeling that tourists rarely popped in. However, I can genuinely recommend koshary for those who are short on cash, those who want to experience genuine Egyptian street life, or just those who have been put off meat by spotting fly-blown carcasses hanging outside a butcher's.