Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East

6. The Global and the Multilocal

6 171 In 2005, two rumors spread among upper-class Egyptians regarding Cilantro , the fastest-growing coffee chain in Cairo. The first was that it had been bought by Starbucks, and that the Cilantro logo and decor would soon be replaced by the green-and-white mermaid logo that has become globally ubiquitous from Seattle to Paris to Dubai. The second rumor was that the Cilantro chain had been bought by a prominent Egyptian businessman who was famous for his Islamist views and that the doors were going to be closed to unveiled women. As is often the case, the rumors were exaggerations of actual incidents. In an interview in 2005, one of the founders of the Cilantro chain explained to me that Starbucks had indeed made an offer for the chain, although they ultimately chose not to accept it.1 The businessman in the second rumor, head of one of the wealthiest families in Egypt, had not bought Cilantro but had invested in the chain as a silent partner, allowing the founders to move ahead with their ambitious expansion plans (without imposing a dress code). The rumors reflect two central concerns about globalization in Cairo: fears that commercial modernity will be too global, becoming a kind of imperialism, and fears that it will become too local (that is, too middle class), robbing it of the translocal character necessary to serve as elite social capital. Underlying these fears is an important fact known to many of Cairo’s elites but often obscured in discourses about globalization produced both by foreigners and by Egyptians: flows of transnational popular culture are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on helpless Egyptians as they are processes managed by Cairene entrepreneurs , who are making a buck while creating the kinds of environments they and their families need to socially construct themselves as cosmopolitan.2 the global and the MultiloCal: developMent, enterprise, and Culture brokers 172 Co n n ec te d i n C a i r o Egypt and the Enterprise Culture Cilantro was created in 1999 by a group of four friends, three of whom were AUC students and one of whom was educated at a culinary school in the United States. “It all started as an idea,” one of them told me in an interview in 2005. “We were traveling . . . in New York and Europe, and we thought, ‘why don’t we create a restaurant . . . , a place where you can have fun at.’” The result was a trendy, successful, European-style bistro called La Bodega in Cairo’s upscale Zamalek area. Underneath the restaurant was a small shop: “We thought we’d take it and do something with it. And at that time we were thinking we’d create a little delicatessen, . . . and that we’d go and buy some gourmet-ish items and sell it here in Egypt where it wasn’t available.” These gourmet items “got stuck in customs and never made it out. So we had the shop ready and didn’t know what to do with it. So we thought, why not start with a coffee machine? And we had a bakery here at the restaurant, and we offer[ed] some croissants and things like that.” So Cilantro opened in 2000 not as a delicatessen but as a coffee shop, selling espresso-based beverages, baked goods, fresh sandwiches, and salads. Its success stimulated the partners to open more outlets, and within five years Cilantro had seventeen locations around Cairo. “And now it’s a huge corporation with 450 employees where me and my other managing partner are completely devoted to Cilantro. La Bodega is now being taken care of [by] a French manager, she knows her stuff, and it’s thriving. We’re concentrating on Cilantro because we saw the potential for it to grow as a chain.” In this narrative, enterprising young Egyptians draw on their cosmo­ politan experiences to recognize a market niche and exploit it. Their travels and education have made it possible for them to locate foreign models and re-create them in the local context. This story reflects, and contributes to, a larger discourse about entrepreneurship, cosmopolitan character, and development that organizes much of contemporary Egyptian economic activity, at least in those areas we perceive as being about globalization. Of particular significance is the way that Cilantro is described as having emerged not from careful planning but from...