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Egyptian coffee chain Cilantro is taking on the big boys in London
FOR A SIMPLE hot beverage, coffee has the power to excite strong emotions. Global chains like Starbucks are accused of suffocating small businesses, blotting out local colour and subjecting the caffeine-loving public to the dull taste of Western homogeneity. But one recent opening in London suggests that the worldwide coffee tide doesn’t always flow in the same direction.
Cilantro opened its first café in Cairo’s upmarket Zamalek neighbourhood in 2000. The brand quickly established a strong presence across the city and subsequently throughout Egypt. At the end of last year the first Cilantro to open outside its home country began serving the tourists and office workers in London’s Piccadilly. Since then a second, larger London venue has opened on Tottenham Court Road, and Cilantro’s management team is looking for more UK locations, with plans to spread further afield into prestigious university cities like Cambridge and Oxford.
“At first the idea looked odd,” concedes Nabil Osman, Cilantro’s representative in the UK. “In fact it looked impossible. It all started with Nadine Beshir [Cilantro’s general manager] – she came up with the idea that rather than waiting for the competition to come from Europe into Egypt, we should do just the opposite.”
Costa is already well-established in Cairo and Starbucks has recently gained a presence, so it makes sense that if Cilantro was to defend its home turf and continue its expansion it would need a globally respected prestige site. London certainly delivers that, but it also comes with fierce competition.
Cilantro’s solution is to stick to what it knows, offering well-priced food and drink with the added benefit of table service to encourage visitors to take a seat and stay. According to Osman, 70-80% of customers eat in.
“All those places like Nero and Costa, I call them conveyor belts,” he says. “They’re very impersonal. You walk in, pick your coffee, look for a clean table – you’re treated like a number. Here we have people who greet you at the door; they help you to find a seat, they make sure you’re comfortable and they look after you.”
It is, he says, the way things are done in Egypt. With an ambitious expansion plan in place across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, it would seem to be working, and it’s also inspiring more Egyptian companies to follow suit. It may have seemed an impossible task at the outset, but Cilantro could be just the first of many Egyptian chains to swim against the commercial tide to London.
WORDS Steve Watson
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