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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Land of the bland
By Peter SnowdonIt was Friday and it was late. Very late. The Blonde had ran her Fiat into the back of a Mitsubishi on the Qasr Al-Nil Bridge that afternoon (look, no brakes!), so that was the end of our proposed midnight milkbar crawl through the badlands of Al-Hussein. By the time she got home to the depths of Maadi, having left some poor backstreet magician to hammer out her bodywork, she was sounding shaken, not stirred. Time to cheer her up, I thought. Time to hop in a taxi and take her to La Casetta.
La Casetta is an Italian restaurant. Or rather, it is an "Italian-style" restaurant. It has an Italian-style name. There are some old, Italian-style copper pots hanging on one wall above the service hatch, along with an Italian-style lucky horseshoe (unluckily suspended upside down). There are Italian-style copies of Degas paintings arranged at strategic intervals around the dining room. There is even an Italian-style wall-mounted TV next to the door, showing those wonderful old black-and-white Italian-style Egyptian movies, with the sound turned down.
The menu confirms this first impression. At last count, there were 2,718 Italian-style restaurants in the Greater Cairo area. I know, dear reader, because I have personally visited 1,953 of them. Of these, 1,949 offer essentially indistinguishable food. They all start off with the same four crypto-European soups, the same six protein-heavy salads. They follow this tour de force with 12 different kinds of pasta out of a packet -- pasta boiled within an inch of its rubbery life, then force-fed on double cream, until it is unable to do anything except lie there in its shallow little bowl feeling sorry for itself. There are pizzas, their crust falling clumsily somewhere in between a perfect sourdough and building-grade asbestos, the gaudy toppings precariously strung together with a bland white high-cholesterol polyfilla, known, apparently, as "cheese". And if that is still not enough, there is a lengthy list of "specialities" -- meat, fish, that kind of thing -- none of which is anything special, and most of which, like Degas's pictures, have their names done in French.
La Casetta is no worse, nor any better, than any of its 1,948 rivals in this genre. If you avoid the obvious traps that lie in wait for the unwary -- including a particularly gruesome Penne alla Capri -- it is perfectly possible to assemble a meal here which will enable you to eat your way from one end of the evening to the other without unwelcome interruption from any noticeable bodily sensation, whether of pleasure or of pain.
But then people don't come here for the pleasures of the flesh and the black magic of the kitchen. They come here because they're young, well-off, and well-dressed, because they've been brought up never to admit they're bored, because the Italian-style French onion soup and filet au poivre aren't that bad, and because there's nowhere else to go, really, while you flick your hair back, or finger the collar of your pin-striped shirt, and wait for the next mobile phone to go off, hoping -- though if someone asked, you couldn't possibly explain why -- that it might be yours.
As usual, it was the Blonde who summed it all up. "It's all Nasser's fault," she said, smiling disingenuously. "If it hadn't been for him, do you think people would be grateful for so little?"
Three starters, one main course and two cups of tea came to LE78, without tips. I don't know what you make of that, but my shrimp salad had only four shrimps in it. "That's Cairo," said the Blonde, giving me an odd look: "Just one disappointment after another."
La Casetta, 11 Road 18, Maadi. Branches in Mohandessin, Heliopolis and Madinet Nasr.
