O
n Talaat Harb, a Belle Époque
street in downtown Cairo,
I pass armoured trucks and
teenage soldiers wearing
bulletproof vests and wielding semi-
automatics. It’s Friday. Two blocks
away is Tahrir Square, where the Arab
Spring blossomed seven years ago,
bringing down an Egyptian president
and fuelling the wildfire of popular
protest across the Middle East.
It’s quiet, but even now one never
knows if, after prayers on Friday afternoon,
people will once again spill into the streets.
Café Riche has been a landmark
on Talaat Harb since 1908. In 1919 the
man who wished to kill the country’s last
Coptic prime minister waited here for his
target (the assassination attempt failed).
In 1923 Umm Kulthum, one of Egypt’s
most popular singers, gave one of her first
public performances in the café. Gamal
Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers methere to plan the revolution that would
unseat the country’s king. Saddam
Hussein and Yasser Arafat stopped by
for thimbles of perfumed Arabic coffee,
the former as a student, the latter on his
way to nearby radio stations.
The café, too, is quiet today. A golden
Labrador sits by the painted-glass entrance.
One of the owner’s sons, a young boy,
hands me a menu in French, English
and Arabic and I sit at a table set with a
red-and-white cloth and a terracotta vase
holding a little Egyptian flag. Sunburnt
German tourists sit at a nearby table. A
waiter in a waistcoat and bow tie presents
my sweet citron pressé with a disappointed
flourish, as befits a grand café.
It’s an echo of old Cairo, untouched
by revolution, when life was unhurried
and the roads were not sullied by the
sound of military patrols.
By contrast, on the north-eastern
outskirts of the old city is an urban sprawlcalled New Cairo. Here, a district called
Al Rehab is a snapshot of what the city has
become since the Arab Spring.
Much of New Cairo is indistinguishable
from any urban centre in the world: malls,
food courts, apartment blocks. But Al
Rehab is unique: a dusty neighbourhood
populated mostly by Syrians, among the
23,000 registered Syrian refugees who
now live in the Egyptian capital.
I’m here visiting Syrian friends who
moved here years ago, long before the
country’s civil war began in 2011. Like
them, I grew up in Syria. I lived in
Damascus until I was 12 and visited every
summer for years after that. Though my
friends and I had long talked about
catching up, we never did. I think we
were reluctant to admit that our reunion
wouldn’t be – couldn’t be – in Damascus.
Reunited, the three of us skirt a
knot of minibuses and taxis and enter
a crowded market set up by Syrian exiles,
full of butchers and bakers, grocers and
CD stores. Two of us sit at a plastic
table while the other orders dishes from
crowded food shops. Teenage boys in
T-shirts and slippers shuttle between diners
and stores, hurriedly setting plates on
paper placemats. A shop called Mahabeh
makes sfeeha, oven-baked flatbread spread
with lamb mince that’s flavoured with
pomegranate molasses and studded with
pine nuts – it’s the best I’ve had outside
Damascus. (So good, in fact, I pack a kilo
of Mahabeh’s sfeeha in my luggage to take
home.) Spiced chicken shawarma slathered
in toum, the thick garlic sauce, comes
from a shop called Al Nakheel.
There are no foreign visitors here.
Al Rehab hasn’t made it into the city’s
must-see lists and may never do so, though
of all the food I’ve eaten in Cairo, the
fare in Al Rehab’s Syrian neighbourhood
is the most deserving of recommendation.
The teenagers clear our plates and
we sit on our white plastic chairs, sipping
glasses of ayran through straws. Café
Riche, reassuringly wood-panelled and
genteel, is filled with a particular sadness,
a nostalgia for Cairo’s imagined past. Al
Rehab, with its crowded rôtisserie chicken
shops and modest butcheries, thrives on
a fervour born of everything its patrons
have lost and the energy they’re mustering
to build their future.● ILLUSTRATION LIZ ROWLAND/ILLUSTRATION ROOMAtaleoftwocities
UNPACKINGIn Cairo,FATIMA BHUTTOinds the past and the future
of the city embodied in very diferent eating spaces.
Travel memoir142 GOURMET TRAVELLER