Historic Café Riche a quiet breakfast spot in crowded Cairo

Mornings are best in Cairo and one of the better ways to enjoy them is at Cafe Riche.

Before 11 a.m., traffic is light — stores are in no hurry to open, nor people to get to work — the air is cool and the haze blurs the view of grime on downtown buildings. On often-jammed Talaat Harb Street, a 19th-century thoroughfare built in a district designed to imitate Paris, the quiet is a plus.

Breakfasting at Cafe Riche takes you back to a time when Cairo was the embodiment of Middle Eastern civility and urban sophistication. The restaurant, 101 years old, is a landmark of that golden age, which Egyptians date from the 1920s to 1952.

The wood-paneled interior is unchanged for a century. Walls are lined with photos of artists and writers, an intelligentsia Hall of Fame. A portrait of Umm Kalthoum, the singing star who debuted at a next-door theater in 1923, hangs above a staircase across from a huge, signed photo of Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's only literary Nobel laureate.

"Cairo was once better than any capital in the world," said the owner, Magdy Mikhail, 62. "Cafe Riche is one of the last reminders. That's why we keep it going."

A simple breakfast of scrambled eggs, flat bread, fresh orange juice and Turkish coffee is $10, or about 56 Egyptian pounds. If you can choose a particular time, try Friday at noon. That's before Muslim prayers, when the streets are empty. Mikhail lays out tables of beans, eggs with dried meat, falafel, tomato-and-cucumber salad and coffee for writers, actors, journalists, painters and directors who gather to talk about politics, art and life.

Coffee and much more

The kaffeeklatsch is a Cafe Riche tradition. Mahfouz, before his 2006 death, used to come and sip unsweetened Turkish coffee.

Cafe Riche also serves lunch and dinner, when Fodor's-bearing tourists often fill the place. Dinner, including hors d'oeuvres, a meat or fowl entree and local Stella beer, is $25. It's wise to stick to the appetizers and avoid the main dishes: The little plates of artichokes filled with béchamel, fried-ground meat and spices, stewed eggplant and fresh cheese are far better than the dried-up steak or fried rabbit dishes that come after.

A seat in the airy, windowed sunroom is best and a visit to the bar downstairs is interesting. Encased there is an old press that Egyptian independence plotters in 1919 employed to print pamphlets against British colonial rule.

In the same year, a would-be assassin leapt from the cafe and threw a bomb at the car of then-Prime Minister Youssef Wahba. The explosion killed no one.

Some historians say Gamal Abdel Nasser plotted the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk in Cafe Riche. Nasser's rise and the two military dictatorships that followed marked the end of downtown's elegance, Mikhail said.

"We've lost the tolerant atmosphere of old Cairo," he said. "It was once cosmopolitan and open." Cafe Riche was founded by an Austrian, and successively sold to a Frenchman and three Greeks in a row before Mikhail's father, an Egyptian Coptic Christian and accountant at the cafe, bought it in 1960.

Arab nationalism and confiscations of property drove foreigners off in the 1950s and 1960s.

The cafe has run up against one local trend that altered its character: Its sunroom, once an open-air cafe that served alcohol, was enclosed after 1990s renovations due to the distaste for drinking among Islamic keepers of piety. Thin curtains keep prying eyes from monitoring the flow of Stella beers.

The room was closed for two years, until last November, because of a dispute with the owner of the five-story building that houses the cafe. The owner wanted to tear down the old building and began dismantling balconies, which would have nullified its designation as a historical structure.

The dismantling has been stopped by court order, and Cafe Riche is safe for now. Mikhail's son, Andrew, 15, is in training at the restaurant to take it over.

"It's the only place like it in Egypt," Andrew said. "It is Egypt. We can't let it go."