Al-Balad Food Walk — Hejazi Home Cooking in Jeddah's Old City
📍 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
About This Experience
Al-Balad is Jeddah's UNESCO-listed old city — a neighbourhood of coral-stone merchant houses and carved wooden mashrabiya screens, mostly unknown to international visitors. The food here is Hejazi, not the kabsa that most people associate with Saudi Arabia. It is older, stranger and more varied: saleeg (white rice slow-cooked in bone broth), saltah stew, the aseeda porridge eaten at dawn, and a slow-roasted lamb dish that takes 12 hours and appears in no restaurant menu in the country. I walk you through the market lanes where my grandmother shopped, explain what Saudi home cooking actually looks like, and take you into a traditional Hejazi coffee house (maqha) for qahwa and dates with the local morning crowd.
Traveler Reviews
Locali.Guide Admin
I have eaten in restaurants all week and nothing came close to this. Sitting at a real family table, eating food that took hours to prepare, learning the story behind every dish — this is what travel is supposed to feel like. Our host was warm, funny and extraordinarily knowledgeable. I have been recommending this to everyone I know who is going to this part of the world.
Taha Shater
I was expecting to eat well. I was not expecting to feel like I'd genuinely been welcomed into someone's life. The food was extraordinary — the best I had on the whole trip. But it was the conversation around the table that I'll remember most. Three hours that felt like twenty minutes.
bassem Mohamed
I searched for authentic local food experiences before this trip and found nothing that looked real. This was exactly what I was looking for. You can tell immediately that this is not a performance — this is how these people actually eat and live. The food was exceptional. Book it.
Meet Your Guide & Host
Food researcher and writer based in Jeddah. I grew up eating the Hejazi food that Saudi Arabia almost never exports — kabsa with dried lime, saleeg rice in bone broth, the saltah stew that my grandmother made on Fridays. Al-Balad, Jeddah's UNESCO-listed old city, is where the real food culture still lives. I take small groups into the neighbourhoods that even most Saudis don't know, and into a family home for a meal that no restaurant can replicate.
View full profile & all experiences →Frequently Asked Questions
How long is "Al-Balad Food Walk — Hejazi Home Cooking in Jeddah's Old City"?
This experience lasts approximately 2.5 hours.
How much does "Al-Balad Food Walk — Hejazi Home Cooking in Jeddah's Old City" cost?
It's $20 per person. You book and message your guide in the Local Guide app.
What languages is it offered in?
Sara Al-Zahrani hosts this experience in Arabic, English.
Who is my guide?
Sara Al-Zahrani, a local guide based in Jeddah. Food researcher and writer based in Jeddah. I grew up eating the Hejazi food that Saudi Arabia almost never exports — kabsa with dried lime, saleeg rice in bone broth, the saltah s
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