Over the past decade the café has become the preferred meeting place in Saudi cities: for work, for meetings, for late evenings. The anthropological question here is not “why did cafés spread?” — the economic answer is well known — but: did people carry their old rules into the new place?
What moved and what did not
Hospitality moved: whoever invites, pays. The ordering of standing moved too, in the choice of table and seat. What did not move is the strict separation in seating, nor the sequence of serving.
A third place
Sociologists call places of this kind the third place — neither home nor work. What distinguishes the Saudi case is that this third place was born into a society that already had an institution resembling it: the majlis. Comparing the two reveals more than studying the café alone.
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