Al Fishawy Cafe in Khan El Khalili | Egypt's Oldest Cafe
Information about Al Fishawy Cafe in Khan El Khalili
The Grand Dame of Cairo's coffee shops is El Fishawy. For more over 250 years, it has been the home of philosophers, musicians, painters, and most notably, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who composed portions of his critically acclaimed Cairo Trilogy in the building's back room. Ahmed Rami was another regular at the coffee shop; he used to write songs for Oum Kalthoum. Its tiny rooms originally held King Farouk's seat as well.
The Vishawi Cafe, "which dates back more than 220 years, has written pages from the history of Egypt, the history of the place, and the genius of time. In 1797, Haj Fahmi established the Vishawi Cafe in a narrow alley in Khan al-Khalili, starting with a small buffet in the heart of Al Khan, where people could sit and shop nearby.
The first room in the café is the "Pasphore" room, lined with ebony-eaten wood, and its tools of silver, crystal, and Chinese were intended for King Farooq and his guests during Ramadan. The second room is called the "masterpiece," a name named after it, where it adorns its walls with shells, frilly wood, ivory, Arabesque, and green-lined couches, especially for artists.
The strangest chamber was the "rhyme" chamber, in which, every Thursday of Ramadan in the canopy, it was scrambled through a person represented by the lightness of the shadows, the speed of the intuition, the fluency of the tongue, and the irony, who started and then was answered by another leader representing another living life, continuing to fight for words until they silenced each other.
