Around midnight, customers begin to take seats near the stage at Club Miami. The clientele remains the same, mostly middle-aged Egyptian men. The band continues to play as the second dancer, Suhayla, takes the stage under a small disco ball. Tamer, Club Miami’s manager, who asked that his real name not be used, says in the winter the club attracts foreigners and in the summer it fills with Gulf Arabs. But most of their clientele is Egyptian.

“We get the rich and the less fortunate,” says Tamer. “Thursday is the busiest day of the week. We start the night at 11pm, but it doesn’t get full before 12 or 1am.” He’s been working in the industry for 10 years and says he’s seen a decline in the number of visitors in the last decade. Despite the influx from Gulf tourists, places like Club Miami are not seeing an increase in customers.

“There are new bars for the middle class everywhere, in Mohandeseen, in the city center and also in hotels,” says Fattah. “This is a new variable and I think it’s related to the economic policy of the state. There is a tolerance now … because [these are] private companies and this is very important economically.”

The next evening, a few kilometers south on 26 of July Street, Ahmed Dessouki leans against a polished wood bar sipping whisky over ice at the Cairo Jazz Club. The 28-year-old architect says he goes out four nights per week, but doesn’t venture to belly-dancing joints or baladi-style bars. “I mostly go to Zamalek bars,” says Dessouki referring to Cairo’s expensive, more Western neighborhood. “I’m not interested in this kind of art.”

The Cairo Jazz Club could easily be in any major American city, with a DJ spinning records in the corner, high-back booth seating and multi-colored track lighting. By midnight there is little room to move as young Egyptian men hold the waists of their girlfriends and mix with foreigners on the tiny dance floor.

“It’s the mentality of the people. We don’t have a big gap between the mentality of Europe and the [United] States,” says Dessouki.

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