Lobby, Dilshad Palace Hotel, Dohuk. January 2019
Another coffee venue
Like the Rixos Hotel [see: Friday morning coffee], the Dilshad Palace Hotel was a place that I went to drink some evenings [see: rooftop bar] and also have Friday morning coffee. Over time, I drifted more toward the Dilshad on Friday mornings. Even with a good salary in Iraq, I found the Rixos prices too inflated with little reason. Quite honestly, I got bored with the place as it tried overly hard to maintain a five-star attitude. It wore thin since Duhok was far from a five-star location.
My becoming a regular at Dilshad Palace on Friday mornings for coffee was a hard sell. They didn't understand at first that I ONLY wanted coffee and not their buffet breakfast. They had a difficult time just finding the price of a cafe latte for me those first few visits. I also needed exact change because their cash drawer was empty first thing Friday morning. It was THAT bad, but I still grew to like it. I just sat at the coffee "bar" and sipped my latte while watching bleary-eyed people stumble out of elevators and into the waiting-for-diners restaurant. The wait staff scurried around making drink orders and clearing away used plates. For them, I became just another piece of furniture on Friday mornings.
The nearby lobby seating area was a study in over-the-top, traditional Arabic/Kurdish fusion decoration on one side and sixties throwback "mod" on the other. The feel was like a lobby for people who had never been outside of Duhok yet imagined how a nice hotel lobby should look. Mostly I watched people wait for their groups to be completed so they could breakfast together. The lobby felt cavernous and empty, but I didn't really care. Friday mornings in Iraq were blissfully quiet - inside and out.
The biggest life event that happened during coffees at Dilshad Palace Hotel on Friday mornings was helping WMF create a decent resume. He woke up early one Friday and met me around 10am (he would have worked until 2 or 3am at the bar). We sat on that mod sixties furniture and crafted a great depiction of his life and skills. I think that might have been the moment when he realized I was actually a friend who wished him a better future and not just some American guy who sat at his bar and complained about work. He was a person who had received little kindness in his life - it is a good memory for me.
I only got to know two of the hotel staff by name - the always exhausted-looking Rania, who made my coffee (and the only one who could work the espresso machine), and tall and lanky Dildar who desperately wanted to talk to me more, but spoke almost zero English. I had a long run of Friday coffees there even as their espresso machine slowly faded and the taste became more and more bitter. And then one day it was no more. Such machines must be cleaned and maintained and the staff admitted, no one knew how to do it. The management had no interest in paying someone else to do it either. With the demise of the espresso machine, my Friday morning coffee shifted yet again.
I was about to become a regular at Cafe au Lait.