I’m sitting in Cairo’s most celebrated tea room, a place that has served pashas and princes, and whose reputation for sterling service is peerless. Yet my biscuit is stale and the waiter is incredulous when I ask for loose-leaf tea.
Groppi’s, on Talaat Harb Square, is a Cairo institution akin to London’s Fortnum & Mason. Older Egyptians wax lyrical about the 85-year-old pâtisserie, whose elegant tea salon was once a place of glamour, intrigue and high society. It was here that celebrities mingled with pashas, cotton magnates secured their fortunes, and Egyptian royals would pop in to pick out lacquered boxes of chocolates and marrons glacés.
Elegance still lingers in the ornate chandeliers and art deco mosaics, but the venerated pâtisserie is well past its sell-by date, its Swiss owners long departed. The 1952 coup that ousted King Farouk marked the end of an extravagant age and set in motion the precipitous decay of Cairo’s cosmopolitan character. Groppi’s got caught by the tide.
But step outside onto Talaat Harb Square, and for a fleeting second that glittering era doesn’t seem all that distant. The busy traffic roundabout, encircled by grand neoclassical buildings, could, with its ground-level clutter removed, pass for 1920s Paris.
The similarities should not be surprising. Ismail Pasha, Egypt’s 19th-century ruler, was captivated by the Haussmannesque boulevards, sumptuous palaces and gardens he had seen during a visit to the French capital in 1867.
Flush with cotton revenues, and green with envy, he commissioned some of Europe’s finest architects to build him his very own Paris on the Nile. With no expense spared, a new quarter for Cairo was laid out with spacious plazas, radiating avenues, grand residential tenements and a 50-hectare pleasure garden.
In the end, Ismail’s ambition exceeded his financial acumen. Cotton prices collapsed, and he ran up a huge tab with a costly war in Ethiopia and the building of the Suez Canal. In the events that followed, Egypt fell under de facto British rule. After putting down a nationalist uprising in 1882, the British army marched on Cairo, where they settled in for nearly 70 years.
‘Egypt had a khedive, and even nominal independence after 1922, but everyone knew where the real power lay,’ says Magda Fahmy, a retired schoolteacher.
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