The Story of Délices: A Hundred Years on Saad Zaghloul Street

How a Greek confectioner's 1922 patisserie in Alexandria became the café that baked King Farouk's coronation cake — and is still run by the same family today.

Walk down Saad Zaghloul Street in downtown Alexandria and you'll pass a café that has been open, in one form or another, for more than a hundred years. Its name is Délices, and its story is, in many ways, the story of cosmopolitan Alexandria itself.

A Greek confectioner and a Mediterranean city

Délices was established in 1922 by Cleovolous Moustakas, a Greek confectioner who had been trading in the city since 1907. Alexandria then was a true Mediterranean crossroads — Greek, Italian, French, Levantine and Egyptian families living side by side — and Moustakas built a patisserie that spoke all of those languages at once. Word spread of his éclairs, his candied almonds, and the ice-cream flavours he is said to have invented.

By royal appointment

Reputation, in those years, travelled all the way to the palace. In 1937, Délices was commissioned to bake the coronation cake for King Farouk. A year later, in 1938, it created the wedding cake for the king's marriage to Queen Farida. For decades that followed, Délices served Egypt's palaces, ministers and statesmen — a quiet 'by royal appointment' that the family has never needed to advertise.

From the cup we poured for kings to the cake on your table tonight.

The same family, the same recipes

What makes Délices unusual is not only its age but its continuity. It is still owned and managed by the same Greek family, and several of the recipes in the kitchen today date to the 1920s. The cassata still carries the words 'since 1922'. Inside the flagship, a small museum holds more than a century of the shop's history — old registers, typewriters, hand-painted signs and photographs.

A new century

Today a new audience has discovered Délices through their phones: millions of followers and reel views, drawn by the pistachio mille-feuille, the kunafa cheesecake, and the simple pleasure of a Greek coffee in a hundred-year-old café. The hope, as the family puts it, is the same as it always was — to serve your family, and one day your children's family, for many years to come.