Since the 1860s, and especially during the 1890s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in Egypt and settled mainly in its two biggest cities, Cairo and Alexandria. The largest groups among them were Mediterranean: Greeks, Italians, Levantines, Maltese, French, and North Africans, alongside smaller groups from around Europe and the Ottoman Empire. This migration was one of the drivers for exponential urban growth in Cairo (and other urban centers), and for the adoption of “European” styles and socio-cultural practices. Its larger context also involved such historical phenomena as modernization, the rise of new social groups, especially the effendiyya, and colonial intervention (first economic and political, and later military occupation). This paper traces the urban and social history of the many coffeehouses that those Mediterranean immigrants established in Cairo. It discusses their numbers and spatial distribution across Cairo, their architecture and design, the new foodways and entertainment they introduced, and the social and gender dynamics among their clientele. This paper will then compare those new coffeehouses to the many that already existed in Cairo, and explore how and to what extent did the new coffeehouses influence the social and cultural dynamics of the older ones. Based on a varied array of evidence, from photographs, to newspapers, memoirs, tour guides, statistical yearbooks, census data, and secret spy reports, this paper will use Cairo’s coffeehouse scene to argue that the effendiyya, as an emerging group in Egyptian society, construed Mediterranean culture as all-European, appropriated it as its own, and maintained sharp distinctions between it and other, closely related, urban socio-cultural forms in order to carve their own place on the social hierarchy. Thus, certain coffeehouses provided the effendiyya with the space to socially create and reproduce itself, but it will also be wrong to identify Mediterranean/European culture only with Egyptian elites or middle classes.