Restaurant review: Fetir at the feast Gamal Nkrumah's eyes were shining with the splendour of a riverside vision Queen Tiye was on hallowed ground. It was well past midnight. Maadi was bathed in a sweltering suspiciously luminous moonlight. She raised her slim, unimaginably beautiful, exquisitely sculptured arm again to summon the waiter. Outside, Maadi was melting in mid-summer Cairene heat, but inside the Grand Café fans vied with the food for the attention of the diners. We were staring into the embers of the oven baking traditional Egyptian brown baladi bread. Head cocked, her hands clasped in a gesture of supplication, Platinum Blonde appeared out of the blue peering into the night sky. Platinum Blonde was glowering in the direction of the Nile. "Dahshour is on fire," she screeched. I smiled and with as much patience as I could muster said, "you know very well that the sectarian conflict in Dahshour has subsided". "Yes," Queen Tiye concurred gravely. "You don't get it, do you," she said between clenched teeth. With more than a tinge of sarcasm Queen Tiye explained that the opposite bank was Manial Shiha and not Dahshour. Platinum Blonde looked at Queen Tiye quizzically. Then she turned to me in a bleary-eyed trance. "In the good old days the opposite bank was rural. Now it is suburbia I suppose," she eyed Queen Tiye for approval. The latter had an overpowering regal air. Despite turning 55, Platinum Blonde boasts that she does not feel like a grown-up. "Yeah, I guess I am still at that age where I'm unafraid to try things," she squealed with laughter, referring of course to the local cuisine. As we sat down to dinner, Sohour to be precise, there was a change in the atmosphere. The starlit night was entrancing, the river's breeze alluring and yes it might sound like a bit of a cliché, but there was magic in the air. Most of the customers, men and women, savoured the hookah, shisha. Queen Tiye had arrived armed to the teeth with disdain for Platinum Blonde. Her midnight black eyes were flashing as she looked imperiously around. "No bread for me, I am wheat intolerant," Queen Tiye trumpeted as we strolled towards the open buffet. Platinum Blonde took my hand in hers and whispered in my ear, "I'll eat anything," her face illuminated by the flickering light of the Ramadan lanterns, her false eyelashes, heavy with mascara, fluttering furiously. She poured a little water in her apricot drink, qamareddin, dipped her finger in it, flicking the juice in all directions much to the consternation of Queen Tiye. Platinum Blonde rattled off in quick succession. She grabbed a couple of gherkins and bellowed in my ear for me to get her some more fetir -- Egyptian pies drenched in liberal quantities of clarified butter, samna baladi, to which she added a dollop of fresh cream. With a contemptuous look on her face, Queen Tiye reached for her tamarind juice. "Sounds like you've got a touch of sunstroke," she remarked with an almost religious riptide. Her humour is jet black. "I don't," snapped Platinum Blonde her piercing blue eyes flashing with fury, her greasy fingers dripping with fat. We talked and talked until a dirty dawn light was seeping into the Grand Café and Maadi was just beginning to stir. Grand Café, Maadi
