Dear Reader,

This author has never claimed to know everything — merely everything worth knowing. And what is worth knowing this week is where Cairo has been keeping its secrets for the better part of a century: behind the gleaming windows of a certain café on Talaat Harb Square, where the coffee is dark, the chandeliers are unreasonably large, and the gossip, one suspects, is even richer than the chocolate.

One does not simply go to Groppi. One is seen going to Groppi, which is an altogether different and far more important activity. The marble floors have borne witness to more engagements announced, more reputations made, and — this author will say no more on the matter — more reputations quietly unmade, than any drawing room in the city could ever hope to host.

It was here, Dear Reader, under these very garden lanterns, that a rather promising young man was once discovered by a director with an eye for such things. Youssef Chahine, never one to miss a face worth putting on film, took one look across the terrace and offered the young Omar Sharif a role that would carry his name rather further than Cairo's city limits. One wonders how many other careers have quietly begun over a cup of Groppi's coffee, never to be recorded in any gazette at all.

And if discovery were not glamour enough, consider this: it is a matter of accepted fact that King Farouk himself, a man who wanted for nothing, wanted for Groppi's chocolate specifically — so much so that one hundred kilograms of it were shipped abroad to the British royal family, a gesture as extravagant as it was, one imagines, entirely unnecessary. When a king ships confectionery across borders in wartime, Dear Reader, one begins to understand precisely how seriously Cairo took its pleasures.

This was never merely a café. It was the beating heart of a society that understood glamour as a kind of civic duty — where a jazz band murmured just loud enough to be heard over crystal, where a lady's entrance was an event unto itself, and where the difference between an ordinary Tuesday and a legendary one was simply a matter of who happened to be sitting by the window.

Whether that golden evening still exists is, perhaps, the wrong question. The better question — the one this author is rather more interested in — is what became of everything it left behind. The porcelain. The silver. The small, precious objects that outlasted the party.

Some of it, Dear Reader, is still out there. Waiting to be found by someone who knows to look.