Belle Époque arcades, hidden bars, jazz in a stairwell, and the best late-night eating in the city.
Downtown — Wust el-Balad — was laid out from the 1860s by Khedive Ismail as a Parisian city, with boulevards, circuses and Haussmann-style apartment blocks. It decayed for decades, and it has been slowly coming back since the 2010s.
At night it is the most interesting part of Cairo that is not medieval.
The old bars
Egypt has a small, long-established drinking culture concentrated in a handful of Downtown institutions, most of them founded by Greek or Italian families in the first half of the twentieth century.
Cafe Riche, on Talaat Harb since 1908, was where the intellectuals and the plotters sat — Nasser is said to have planned the 1952 coup in it, and Mahfouz drank there. It has closed and reopened more than once.
El Horreya on Falaki Square is a bare, brightly lit hall with marble tables where old men play chess and beer is served in bottles. There is no décor and no pretence. It is one of the great bars.
Estoril, in an arcade off Talaat Harb, does mezze and beer in a quieter room.
Alcohol in Egypt is legal, restricted to licensed premises and shops, and considerably less visible than in Europe. Stella is the local beer; Sakara the other. Egyptian wine exists and is not good.
Music and culture
Cairo Jazz Club in Agouza is the long-running live venue. Room Art Space, Makan — for zar and Nubian music — and various rooftops run programmes.
Zamalek across the river has more of the bar and restaurant scene, and Maadi further south is the expat district.
Late eating
Cairo eats late and the Downtown streets fill from about ten. Koshary, hawawshi, shawarma and fiteer are all sold until very late, and the juice bars — sugarcane, mango, guava — stay open past midnight.
Felfela is the reliable sit-down Egyptian restaurant for visitors. Abou El Sid in Zamalek does traditional cooking in a heavily decorated room.
The ahwa
The neighbourhood coffeehouse is the actual institution: plastic chairs on the pavement, tea, shisha, backgammon, and football on a television. There is one on nearly every street.
Historically male spaces, and in the more traditional districts still overwhelmingly so — women, both Egyptian and foreign, will find some ahwas welcoming and others not. In Downtown and Zamalek this is much less of an issue.
Safety
Downtown at night is busy and safe. Ordinary care with pockets in crowds.
Women travelling alone should expect a level of street comment that is well documented and unpleasant, and is not usually a precursor to anything else. Firm disengagement works. It is worth being prepared for rather than surprised by.
