FSNP's Upper Deck Lounge Might Be Cairo’s Most Polished Levantine Spot

On a Cairo rooftop where the air seems to thin just enough to carry the scent of charcoal and cardamom, the Four Seasons’ Upper Deck Lounge has quietly recast itself as an ode to the Eastern Mediterranean. The new Levantine menu, unveiled this July, reads like a well-travelled dinner guest - someone with good taste, impeccable manners, and a nostalgic memory of Beirut before traffic, Damascus before dust.

From the fifth floor terrace, the city performs its nightly shimmer. Below, the Nile gurgles and mutters; above, a pool glows like an expensive secret. And in between, plates begin to arrive. Mezze, the opening act, comes in confident little bowls: pistachio labneh made silkier by grilled olives, smoked eggplant ajami that tastes like someone told baba ghanoush it could dream bigger, and a tomato kasoundi hummus that borders on flirty.

Heartier fare follows with deliberate drama: shish tawouk, burnished from the grill, comes skewered like a declaration; lamb cutlets with freekeh arrive tender and smoky, and lamb chops threaten to unseat Cairo’s grill hierarchy.

The manakish are soft, the wraps streetwise, and the drinks are politely persuasive. At Upper Deck Lounge, Levantine cooking isn’t romanticised or dressed up in nostalgia. It’s calibrated and precisely what it should be at sunset, when Cairo glows like an ember and dinner feels like a pause in time.