14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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Coffee cup gazing
It would be impossible to make any claims for the cappuccino, or at least any claims in good faith. It is warm -- even, on rare occasions, hot -- but that, in all honesty, is about it. Oh, and sometimes they sprinkle a little cinnamon on the froth, but only when there is cinnamon to hand, and that is not very often. Actually, I can remember only a single occasion when there was both cinnamon to hand and the frothing machine was working sufficiently well to produce froth, so the probability of having a hot, frothy, cinnamon topped cappuccino is quite feasibly the same as witnessing the passing of Hayley's comet -- i.e. once in a lifetime, and only if you happen to be in the right place and looking in the right direction at the right time. Which I suppose is a roundabout way of saying this is no place for coffee snobs.
Yet still I persist, and regularly so, to visit the Excelsior. It does not, of course, have quite such a venerable history as other potential Downtown coffee stops. No one sighs ohh, you should have seen it in the old days, you should have tasted the ice cream and the patisseries then. It was, I am told, though I do not know how reliably, once a part of the Metro cinema complex, and it once, too, boasted a bar with a separate entrance. No longer, though it does continue to serve beer to its customers if that is what they want.
Nor is the food to be recommended, at least not in my experience, which, admittedly, is restricted to having once ordered a roast beef sandwich. The most positive thing to be said about that particular event is that the possibility of any degenerative illness causing element surviving in the meat ended several hours before the joint was removed from the oven. But not only do I continue to visit the Excelsior, to sip on my tepid, froth free coffee, I occasionally recommend it to friends.
Why? The chairs are far from comfortable and the place is encased by large, plate glass windows that can make customers feel as if they are sitting within an enormous aquarium. It is a feeling that grows more intense if you happen to visit after the sun has gone down. Then, the interior lighting, never subtle, assumes its full, neon-lit intensity. Sitting in the window -- which is, in the end, the only place to sit -- one is apt to feel like a character out of an Edward Hopper painting, especially if alone. And in truth one is often alone given the inability of friends to come remotely close to recognising the charms of the place. So you simply have to brave it, the sideways glances of passing pedestrians, the exposure to that faintly pitying look that takes in your solitary state and concludes that not only are you a lonely, despairing sort, but that you are quite possibly seedy, if not certifiably mad.
But if fish can be gawked at they can stare balefully back. Which is why the only possible seat to take in the Excelsior is a window seat. The only possible justification for being there, after all, for balancing on an uncomfortable, green metal chair, uncomfortably spot lit, is to observe, to indulge in that most languorous of occupations, the people watch.
The Excelsior's only selling point is its location. It is on Talaat Harb, and however much people oh and ah over decades old memories of Groppi's cabinet puddings and complain about the subsequent decline, the seediness of the area, the fact remains that this is the only street in town through which, daily, tens of thousands of people pass. Such a quantity of traffic is, in itself, sufficient testimony to the foresight of those who planned the only area in the city that can pass muster as a city centre. And however many articles you read about the rustication of the city this endless procession of people serves as a necessary underlining of the continuing allure of the urban dream. Forget, for a moment, the deadweight of demography. Here are people, en masse, in pursuit of that elusive, urban experience.
If you are the proprietor of the kind of shop that thrives on passing trade this is, in the end, the only street for you. Oddly, though, sitting in the window, the recipient of pitying glances, it does not take long to note that those condemning you as a sad character are not exactly overladen with shopping bags. They, too, are killing time, in this city centre, and quite possibly engaged in the same activity as you. They are out to observe, and to do so as far away from the suburbs, or indeed the village, as it is possible to get.
Shopkeepers are the urban equivalent of farmers, the kind of people for whom business is always bad. Just as a farmer will tell you that yes, his lushly green fields might look as if they promise a bumper harvest but shh, listen closely and you can just make out the click click click of the Colorado beetle busily blighting his potatoes underground, so in the midst of a retail boom shopkeepers tell you that they are just ticking over.
Sit in the window of the Excelsior, though, and you can easily begin to sympathise with the shopkeepers' tales of woe. On a busy day, within an hour, several thousand people will have passed, and few, indeed, will be carrying those tell tale plastic bags.
The fabric of a city is nowhere more fragile than at its centre, and Cairo, for better or worse, has no other. Perhaps all those statistics and pronouncements intended to show that no, we are not in the midst of a recession, are true, and that somewhere else, on the streets of Mohandessin, possibly, money is being spent in bucketfuls. This I doubt, and in any case it is at the heart that the important symptoms show. Or perhaps it is just a case that the shops in the city centre simply do not sell the things that people want, that like Alice, confronted with a knitting ram (John Tenniel's illustration to Alice Through the Looking Glass, inset) customers walk into the shops, peer at the shelves only to find out that what they thought they desired has somehow faded away.
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