TRAVEL MEMOIR
In Cairo, the city's past and future are embodied in very different eating spaces.
In Cairo, FATIMA BHUTTO finds the past and the future of the city embodied in very different eating spaces.
On Talaat Harb, a Belle Époque street in downtown Cairo, I pass armoured trucks and teenage soldiers wearing bulletproof vests and wielding semiautomatics. 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 met here 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 sprawl called 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.