CAIRO: It is said that Cairo is a city of coffee shops. Of these, the overwhelming majority are familiar neighbourhood ahwas, complete with sawdust-strewn floors and old men sucking on battered shishas.
Over the last few years, Cairo’s wealthier neighborhoods have seen a sharp rise in the number of chic cafés, both foreign and locally owned. In Zamalek, it seems that a new café opens every week, providing fierce competition for the attention of the wealthy, largely foreign, clientele.
The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is the newest, and most talked about, addition to the Zamalek café club. Unfortunately, it falls far short of the buzz generated by its opening. Its interior is one of the most comfortable in the neighbourhood, with large plush chairs, numerous outlets for laptops, free wireless Internet connection and many windows that let in plenty of sunshine. But The Coffee Bean is a classic case of style over substance, and the café’s slick interior is far and away the best thing about it.
The key to a good café is good coffee, and Coffee Bean’s brew does not disappoint. Unfortunately, it also does not stand out. A cafe latte (LE 9) or cappuccino (LE 9) has become a staple at Zamalek coffee joints, and The Bean’s are basically the same as any other you’ll find on the island. The one difference is that at Coffee Bean, you’ll be served your drink in a tall glass cup with a flourish of foam on top.
The Bean’s real weakness is in its food. Recently some friends and I spent an afternoon sampling the lunch and desert menu, and were left with a funny taste in our mouths – both literally and figuratively. I tried the chipotle roast chicken sandwich panini (LE 15) and the spicy chicken pasta salad (LE 16.) After an unnecessarily long wait, the meal arrived, and the adventure began.
To put it simply, both dishes were weird and neither resembled the descriptions or pictures on the menu. The grilled chicken sandwich was neither grilled nor served as a panini, but was a scoop of neon green chicken-and-soft-cucumber salad served between two thick and flavorless slices of focaccia bread. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t good.
The pasta salad was even worse, so much so that when the waitress delivered the dish I was sure she had confused my order. Unlike many cafés in Zamalek which get pasta salad right, The Coffee Bean’s more closely resembles the mystery meat served in a grade school cafeteria. A mountain of limp, wilted lettuce, topped by a handful of cold, limp spaghetti and then another handful of bland chicken chunks, drowned in a gooey mess of generic Caesar salad dressing. The coup de grace was a long black hair at the bottom of my salad bowl. Charming.
Both dishes were certainly edible, but quite un-enjoyable. I recommend neither.
And my friend and I spent a few minutes at the counter trying to pick out a representative dessert sample. We chose a chocolate brownie (LE 10), a piece of carrot cake (LE 12) , a chocolate chip cookie (LE 7) and tiramisu (LE 15), as well as two “Ice Blended drinks, one cinnamon and one caramel (LE 15). The iced drinks were by far the highlight of the entire meal, and are refreshing. But the rest of desert was as perplexing as lunch had been.
To begin with, all of the deserts we were served were stale. Carrot cake is supposed to be moist, but at The Bean it is crunchy and tastes days old. The icing is like barely flavored cream cheese and had the texture of glue. To make matters worse, the cake was flecked through with pieces of some unidentifiable, fibrous, candied root vegetable. It was clearly not carrot, and my friend guessed that it may have been turnip, parsnip or celeriac. Anyone care for some turnip cake?
The tiramisu did not taste like tiramisu, which is made with mascarpone cheese, espresso, lady fingers and rum. I did not expect to be served rum at a coffee shop, but the absence of the alcohol was the least of the dish’s problems. The Bean’s tiramisu tastes like it is made with a generous amount of gelatin, which fans of Italian cuisine will note is in fact completely absent from an authentic tiramisu recipe. Instead of espresso or rum, it was flavored with orange syrup. Instead of a layer of lady fingers, small pieces of cake were tossed pell-mell throughout it, as if the chef had thrown a handful of biscuits into the gelatin before it had time to set. The recipe was thrown on its head, and the result was a jiggling mess. It did not taste objectively bad, and if it had not been marketed as tiramisu it may have been enjoyable, but served as such it was both weird and disappointing.
The chocolate chip cookie was flavorless and over-cooked, and had the texture of sand. It began to crumble and disintegrate as soon as it was touched, and the flavor of the chocolate was indistinguishable from the grainy taste of burnt batter. Although the brownie was stale, it was the best of the bunch, because it was served warm and the melted icing was enough to soften its brittleness.
If what you are looking for in a coffee shop is a new, fresh place to see and be seen, where you can drink perfectly average coffee and suffer your way through the menu, then The Coffee Bean may be your place. As for me, I will be at another coffee shop.
