Cairo loses its weekends

Riyadh loses its summer. Cairo only loses its weekends.

The North Coast is open, and from now until September the same thing happens every week. On Thursday afternoon the road west begins to fill. By Thursday night it is a slow line of cars with children asleep in the back. On Saturday night the line comes back the other way, and on Sunday morning everyone is at a desk, a little sunburnt, in a city that never actually emptied.

A Cairo restaurant feels this before anyone explains it. A place that has lived on Friday lunch and Saturday dinner for nine months of the year finds itself in late June with a decent Tuesday and a dead Friday, and the first instinct is to blame the heat, or the economy, or the new place across the road.

Then the owner looks at the monthly number, and the monthly number is nearly fine. Down a little. Nothing to lose sleep over. Because the month adds up the weekdays, and the weekdays have held. The two days the business was built on are the only two that fell, and they fell quietly, inside a total that still looks like a business.

That is the tell: the shape of the week underneath the total.

Until September the Cairo operator is running a weekday business in premises, staffing and a menu designed for a weekend one. The Thursday-night regular is now a Tuesday-night regular, or a customer of somebody by the sea. The Friday family lunch has gone west with the family.

None of that shows up in covers. It shows up in the day the covers fell on.

The summer question for a Cairo restaurant is not how many people came. It is which day of the week they stopped coming, because that answer is the whole plan.