Cairo, Egypt
For more than a century, Café Riche has been far more than a coffee house in the heart of Cairo. It has been a space where decisive moments of Egypt’s cultural and political history took shape. Between its walls, which have retained their old European character, politics intertwined with literature, the secret with the public, and generations passed through who found in the place more than a cup of coffee: they found it a forum for ideas and a laboratory of time.
At the end of 2025, the Ismailia Real Estate Investment Company announced its intention to develop the historic Café Riche building and convert it into a luxury “boutique” hotel, as part of a wider project to rehabilitate Khedival Cairo, including the conversion of about 50 historic buildings into hotels and tourist spaces. The ground floor will remain designated for the café and commercial spaces, with one floor for a theater, a restaurant, and an entertainment studio, and the fifth floor prepared as a boutique hotel.
Whether the soul of a place where Egypt’s revolutions were planned can survive as a hotel lobby remains an open question.
You can’t mistake the café tucked into a corner on Talaat Harb Street in downtown Cairo. It is both welcoming and intimidating. Through its old glass-and-wood door, it is as if you step back in time, away from the hustle and bustle of downtown. The Café Riche building was constructed in 1908, and for the greater part of the 20th century, Riche was at the throbbing heart of Egypt’s intellectual and political life.
In 1914, the Frenchman Henri Reissin bought it and gave it its current name, echoing Khedive Ismail’s ambition for his new European-style capital to be a “Paris on the Nile.” The French Café Riche was frequented by Paris’ literary giants, including Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola.
Ownership transferred to Greek-Egyptian Michael Nicapoulos in 1916, who added a theater that became one of the city’s most well-known performance spaces. George Basile Avaianos purchased it in 1942. In 1962, Abdel Malek Michael Saleb became the first Egyptian to own the café.
Café Riche transformed into one of Cairo’s prominent social and cultural centers, linked with the Egyptian national movement and with major writers, thinkers, and artists, from Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and prominent poet Ahmed Shawqi, to widely-acclaimed novelist Youssef Idris and iconic singer Umm Kulthum.
A witness to Egypt’s transformations
Before Café Riche, the Egyptian café was typically a Gahwa Beladi (local café). These were neighborhood-centric, featured low wooden stools (takhta), served mainly coffee and shisha, and were almost exclusively for working-class men.
When Khedive Ismail redesigned Cairo in the 1860s (known as Khedivial Cairo), he wanted to mimic Haussmann’s Paris. This created “Downtown” (Wust al-Balad), a district of wide boulevards and circular squares, grand stone buildings with high ceilings, and outdoor seating that encouraged “people watching,” a European social pastime that was new to the region.
Dr. Mohamed Afifi, professor of modern and contemporary history at Cairo University, tells Culture Custodian that the importance of Café Riche is inseparable from the emergence of “modern cafés” in Egypt. He explains: Before the appearance of this pattern, cafés had a traditional popular character, while cafés like Riche, Groppi, and L’Américain came with a model influenced by the European space in form and social function.
These cafés became associated with the effendi class, the middle and upper middle class, and intellectuals, becoming public spaces for discussion and exchange of ideas.
Café Riche played a notable role during the 1919 Revolution, when intellectuals and activists used it as a meeting place to exchange ideas. With the expansion of cafés, bookshops, publishing houses, and cinemas in downtown Cairo during the twenties and thirties, Riche became part of an integrated cultural system.
What the boutique hotel developers will find when they renovate remains to be seen, but they should know what lies beneath. Seven decades after the 1919 Revolution, the Cairo earthquake struck in 1992, resulting in the discovery of a hidden cellar beneath the café. Inside, a printing press that had been used to print secret leaflets calling for the 1919 Revolution was found, along with a secret back door.
These contradictions played out within Riche itself. Upstairs, wealthy patrons listened to performances by the legendary Umm Kulthum. Below, in the café’s basement, revolutionaries operated the secret printing press, churning out leaflets calling for revolution against British rule.
In one of its corners sat medical student Erian Youssef, lying in wait for Youssef Wahba Pasha, the prime minister during Sultan Fuad I’s era. As his car approached, the young radical threw two hand grenades that failed to assassinate him. The attempt came in the execution of a decision by the secret apparatus of the 1919 Revolution, in protest against his acceptance to form the ministry when the street was rallied around Saad Zaghloul.
Revolutionaries clashing with the British sometimes sought shelter inside Riche, which became a regular target of police raids. Nearly a century later, a different generation of revolutionaries revolted against Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years. In Riche, they found refuge from the teargas-infused battles of Tahrir Square.
Fighter Mahmoud al-Issawi sat in Riche in 1945, drank his coffee, then headed to parliament to assassinate Ahmed Maher Pasha, the prime minister during King Farouk’s era.
If hotel guests eventually occupy the fifth floor, they’ll sleep above the tables where Gamal Abdel Nasser and his fellow Free Officers partly planned the 1952 revolution, though other downtown political cafés also claim that honor. Nasser and Mohamed Anwar Sadat frequented it before July 1952, and they later became presidents of Egypt.
The decline of its historical role
The 1952 coup gave a shot in the arm to Egypt’s native leftist and liberal intellectuals, including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who held his literary court there for many years. The café transformed in the sixties into an unofficial literary salon where intellectuals gathered for ideological discussions and political dialogues.
The theater that will be converted under the new development plan once hosted Naguib Mahfouz’s weekly seminars after they were banned by security from the Opera Casino, transforming every Friday evening into a fixed appointment known to young writers by the minute.
Writer and poet Maysoon Saqr, author of “Café Riche: An Eye on Egypt,” observed that the café distinguished itself with a “national” character. She explains: During the occupation period, Café Groppi was more associated with foreign soldiers, while Riche became a meeting place for the national movement and Egyptian intellectuals.
Yet even in its heyday, the café had critics. Poet Ahmed Fouad Negm wrote his satirical poem “Long Live My Country’s People” about the café’s intellectuals, criticizing what he saw as a separation between discourse and practice. He said in it: “Long live the intellectual at Café Riche / Slicked and suited, full of talk / Empty of practice / Enemy of crowds / With a few empty words / And a few terms / He fabricates solutions to problems instantly.”
Mubarak’s tenure accelerated the decline. In 1990, Café Riche closed under mysterious circumstances and was seriously damaged by the 1992 earthquake.
Saqr believes the café tried to restore some of this role with the outbreak of the January 25, 2011, revolution, when it opened its doors to discussions and meetings, and this was repeated in June 2013.
Antony Michell, one of the heirs of Café Riche, remembers bringing injured demonstrators inside during the January 28, 2011, clashes. “We used to bring the injured inside the café during the clashes, especially on January 28, 2011, and we closed the doors to protect those inside from tear gas, and officers and soldiers would sometimes enter to change their clothes or regain their balance before returning to the street,” he says.
He points out that this solidarity role continued during the events of 2013, when he and his brother participated in the “Tamarod” campaign, a grassroots movement that collected millions of signatures petitioning for the removal of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi.
But “turnout remained relatively stable until the coronavirus pandemic, which formed a watershed in the decline of activity inside the place,” Michell says. He attributes this to people staying in their homes or the death of a number of the café’s regular intellectuals during the pandemic period, which led to a noticeable decrease in attendance.
Afifi sees the decline of Riche’s role as gradual, like most cafés and cultural spaces in downtown Cairo. He explains: Intellectuals no longer find in the café the same place that allows them to meet the public or readers, as was the case in previous periods, and the decline of downtown Cairo’s centrality politically and culturally was directly reflected in Riche’s condition, which has become a model for a broader transformation that has affected the entire area.
Preservation or erasure?
The downtown area is now witnessing government-led efforts to revive buildings by restoring them and organizing advertising signs in a style suitable for the heritage area. The Ismailia Real Estate Investment Company’s plan is part of this wider project to rehabilitate Khedival Cairo.
Afifi believes that the café’s future is linked to the future of downtown Cairo itself, specifically regarding whether the city will retain its open cultural spaces, or gradually transform into a tourist facade without real public life.
Regarding the building’s future, Michell clarifies that the café’s situation is stable and confirms that the family will work to keep it without any change. Yet how a café functions with hotel guests overhead remains unclear.
Art critic Khaled Mahmoud, one of Riche’s regulars, says that the café was an open platform for ideas, discussions, and differences. He adds that Riche did not gather intellectuals because of the coffee or the location only, but because of what was happening at the tables—questions about literature, politics, and art.
He believes that Riche’s real value was not in its decoration or architectural history, but in being a witness to cultural transformations in Egypt, and a place that preserved the memory of successive generations of creators. He adds: “Even today, just sitting here gives you a feeling that you’re sitting on top of layers of stories.”
Whether those stories will still echo after boutique hotel conversion, or fade into the sanitized heritage the government envisions for downtown, remains an open question. The walls have survived revolutions. Whether they can survive preservation is less certain.
This article was published in collaboration with Egab.
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