Ever since childhood, Mostafa Basiouny’s favorite food has been liver, or “kebda” in Arabic. When he graduated from the medical school in 2015, he decided that he would turn his favorite food into a second job.

Right after his graduation, Basiouny and his friend Mohammad Amer agreed to open “Dr. Kebda,” a theme restaurant that serves liver in a setting that resembles an intensive care unit of a hospital.

The project drew other doctors and medical students. They opened the restaurant in July in the lower Egyptian city of Damanhur. Some of the team continued to study or practice medicine during the day and work at the restaurant in their evenings, carefully dividing their time between their classes and residency shifts.

Amer, who is still a medical student at the Alexandria Faculty of Medicine, said he and Basiouny created the restaurant as a unique business idea. “We wanted to establish a working-class restaurant with a new image. We wanted our restaurant to have a different atmosphere from those that serve popular Egyptian food. We proposed the idea to a group of friends, some of whom were also medical students, and we started to secure the necessary funding by forming a simple joint stock company,” Amer told Al-Monitor.