Strada’s storefront in a mid-century rough-hewn apartment building sets the café’s aesthetic tone with a black metal doorframe inset with dust-free glass. Nearly every café and restaurant fills these spaces with overstuffed furniture, faux-historical decorations, football banners, and TVs. On Rainbow Street, as with the rest of Amman, every building is made of the same desert dust-coated white stone, and most interiors are the reverse side of those stones paired with white tile. The two friends, with former owner Nick Neibauer, a Seattleite who met and married a Jordanian girl while living in Italy, opened Caffè Strada in 2012 along Rainbow Street, a popular and rare pedestrian-friendly stretch in a charming 1920s neighborhood. “That didn’t really exist in Jordan, and we figured if we wanted somewhere like that there must be more people.” “We just wanted a place where we could sit, read a good book, and have quality products in a non-smoking environment,” Laith wrote in an e-mail. When they imagined opening a café, they had many small shops to inspire them. Like many young, well-off Jordanians, Laith al-Masri and Firas Shababneh had spent plenty of time in Europe and the United States and knew and loved those coffee cultures. But in developing countries, commercial and cultural changes can happen fast, especially when a model, if not a franchise, can be imported and plunked down fully formed. A few tried to split the aesthetic difference between the boisterous, smoke- and backgammon-filled local coffeehouses and the second-wave chic of Western chains, creating unlovable cultural stepchildren. When I returned five years later, Starbucks, Gloria Jean’s, Caribou Coffee, and Second Cup had staked out the country, drawing locals and expats alike.Īs the global companies merrily colonized Jordan, local cafés began to appear. That year, Jordan’s first Starbucks opened in the capital’s embassy district on a main thoroughfare that would clog with coffee traffic every morning and evening for months. Then in 2005, when the insurgency kicked off hard, the rich neighborhoods of Amman filled with American and European diplomats, contractors, and corporate workers who did business in Iraq but couldn’t safely live in Baghdad. Before the conflict, outside of luxury hotels and a couple hip restaurants, the only sludge-less coffee option was Nescafé. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Iraq War brought Western-style coffee to Jordan. Each of these conversations ended with a line like, “It’s not just good-for-Amman coffee it’s good coffee.” (Photos: Cory Eldridge.) In Amman, an Arab city brimming with great Turkish coffee, espresso and drip coffee were rated not for their quality but for their tolerability. When you uncover something you love-a good cup of coffee-in a place you don’t expect it-Amman, Jordan-you deserve praise for your treasure hunting. I couldn’t bear to brag that I was way ahead of them on this discovery because their enthusiasm so closely matched the rush and joy I’d felt when I found Strada. Ver the few months after Caffè Strada opened in 2012, several friends began rhapsodizing to me about this amazing new café they’d discovered and just had to tell me about.
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