speakeasies

Before leaving on his brief side-trip to southern Egypt (I believe he’s in Aswan at the moment), Lingis had been laughing about how “all the restaurants in Zamalek are like speakeasies,” relatively unmarked and difficult to find.

The weird thing is that, while I had noticed this long ago in each individual case to which he referred, for some reason I had never abstracted from those cases and realized that a strange general pattern does exist. I’m not sure if the reason for it is related to law, custom, or simple chance, but the pattern is there.

The first place he had in mind was Aubergine, a mostly vegetarian restaurant right around the corner from me. He tried to track it down via guidebook, and was standing right outside it without knowing it was there. (Like most people, I had to be shown where it was by someone else.)

The second example was an even more concealed upstairs restaurant whose name he couldn’t remember, but which upon questioning turned out to be La Bodega on 26th of July Street. This one is even more hidden. I was hearing about it for 3 or 4 years (!) and passing by it literally on a daily basis without noticing it. In the end, again, someone had to take me there.

The fashionable Abu el-Sid (fine Egyptian cuisine) also has a bit of the speakeasy feel, with its giant, iron-looking, and unmarked doors. Only a cryptic image of a man on a horizontal sign suggests the presence of a business there at all. Whenever entering I always feel like I’m going into a Middle Eastern version of the courtroom in Kafka’s The Trial.

Then tonight I tracked down a place Lingis found by himself, with the fairly typical name (for a pasta place) of Mezzaluna. But the weird thing is, I’d never even heard of it, let alone been there– even though it’s so close to my home I could quite possibly throw a baseball from here and hit it. The problem is that you have to go south on a side street from 26th of July, then turn left into a sort of illuminated hipster alleyway where the restaurant sits between an upscale carpet place and an upscale women’s fashion outlet. I’d honestly never seen any of these places before, just because I had assumed there was nothing down that street. It looks too quiet and residential.

Lingis is basically right… There are an awful lot of semi-hidden restaurants in Zamalek.

We will get the promised lecture from him on Wednesday, one of his costumed ones, possibly with weird music in the background. He’s taken a real liking to Cairo on this trip (he hadn’t known it well) and if not for his family of rare birds in Baltimore, perhaps we could talk him into relocating to Egypt. What a strange, unexpected delight to have him here for a few weeks, right up the street. It’s been the biggest pleasant surprise of the past year.