The Greeks monopolized not just the restaurants and cafés of the city center, but also the coffee stores. The first, Sofianopoulo, was established in 1908 on the site of what was the French post on rue Saad Zaghloul. It specialized in selling a mixture of Ethiopian, Yemenite, Brazilian and Colombian coffee. El Tantawi took it over in 1932, and Sofianopoulo stayed on for another five years before emigrating to Greece in 1937. Although up until the fifties the clientele were mainly people over forty years old, since youngsters did not drink coffee, especially dark coffee, Sofianopoulo has expanded and is willing to change with the times: it now offers light coffee with a variety of flavors such as hazelnut, chocolate, and vanilla. It also sells new types of coffee, mainly Indonesian and Indian, which is cheaper and therefore more affordable to the majority of the clientele.

In 1992 a small coffee shop was added to the store, where clients can have a cup of coffee. In the morning it is usually grownups who have their breakfast there, while in the evenings the young people from the area pop in for a cup of coffee. Tourists, too, often enjoy a coffee there. The superior quality of Sofianopoulo’s coffee made it the supplier of coffee to the Presidency in Cairo until the 1980s. It also featured in Samia el Etreby’s Hakawi el Ahawi TV program. In June 2008, Sofianopoulo was divided into two shops for inheritance reasons.