Restaurant review: The fronds of Palmyra We could've been in Paris, except for the napkins I think of the silk road as a long length of silk fabric, an orange-tinted curtain flapping in the wind, fluttering across mountains, slithering across valleys, smelling of incense and spice. Along that road, caravans would spend the night at inns offering house wine with Roman, Phoenician, and Persian cuisine. Camels would start out at dawn, their hooves catching the silk fabric ever so slightly, trotting to the soundtrack of Lawrence of Arabia. The reality of roadside avalanches, of muddy monsoons and bloody ambushes defies this vision, but then reality matters less the closer you get to the Euphrates, where Zenobia was finally caught. A few years ago I visited the ruins of Palmyra (city of palm trees, aka Tadmur, two hours north of Damascus) and took a walk along the colonnaded miles of city streets. Even amid the 17-century-old debris, it is hard not to visualise the Palmyrans having a night out, moving from one inn to another, speaking in many tongues, sampling the riches of the old world as few ever have. Even Rome was never that central to the old world. Palmyra sits squarely on the silk road. At the height of its prowess, it controlled a tentative empire running from the Nile to the Euphrates. It all happened around 270 AD, when Palmyra's ruler, Zenobia, a polyglot woman who hunted lions in a bare-breasted costume, wrote a book about the region, out-drank her generals, spoke five or six languages (Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Arabic and Aramaic), and claimed kinship with Cleopatra, challenged the Roman empire and lost, in a fairly close battle. She was caught fleeing east across the Euphrates and taken back to Rome, where she was paraded in golden chains, then given a villa in southern Italy, where she reportedly spent her final years tending her garden. The Grand Palmyra has Romanesque colonnades in the vicinity, the colonnades of Heliopolis, a suburb built with a mix of European and Arabesque flair nearly a century ago. I am sitting with the Californian at the top level of a sizeable roadside open-air verandah, with a view of the overland metro line, of pedestrians shopping in the colonnaded promenade across the street, of a minuscule crescent that looks uncertain of the future. And we buy our own napkins. The napkins are not a good sign. Only the cheapest bar-restaurants in Cairo do that. They supply you with a box of napkins and then terrify you with music that is live but should be dead, along with waitresses who want to peel your peanuts and look you in the eye. None of this happens in Palmyra. This is a family place, solid middle-class, conservative by the standards of the 1940s, almost daring by today's standards. It has no barrier between the alcohol-drinking customers and the street, apart from a symbolic low fence. The clientele are a mixed bag. Families in European and Islamic attire enjoy their mixed orders of beer and juice. The table nearest to us switches back and forth between Arabic and German. Finally, a chance to dine without pretense, on the side-walk, with alcohol. "We could've been in Paris, except we had to buy our own napkins," says the Californian, who loves the good service and the cheerful but not imposing waitress. The smoke-scented babaghanoug is a success and so is the tabboulah, slightly low on oil but fresh. The main entries are mostly grills. We get the pigeons and the lamb chops and judge them acceptable. Although I can't resist sitting outside, the restaurant has two enclosed areas with interesting décor. One is furnished with Bogart-style half-circular seating with a touch of Arabesque. Another is art deco-meets- the 1960s. The Grand Palmyra, (02) 418 8113, 25 Al-Ahram Street, Heliopolis, across from Cinema Normandy, open 9am to 3am daily. Simple grills in an open air, old world ambiance. Dinner for two, including four beers, LE140. By Nabil Shawkat
