Trianon Alexandria is Getting a Shark Tank-Sized Upgrade

When Ahmed Tarek Khalil, the chairman of Allianz Middle East and an angel investor on Shark Tank Egypt, decided to purchase Trianon in mid-2025, his goal was clear: to restore Trianon’s fame as a rightful part of Alexandrian heritage, and make the business as competitive as its legacy is enduring.

Since its founding in 1905 by two Alexandrian Greeks, Trianon has occupied a distinctive corner overlooking Saad Zaghloul Park and the Mediterranean Sea, in an 18th century building that is Le Metropole Hotel. From hosting visiting dignitaries to becoming a film set and a destination of choice for wedding arrangements for its famed patisserie, Trianon has survived the past 121 years in Alexandria when many other establishments like it have fallen by the wayside. Nevertheless, it’s still faced its share of difficulties.

“There aren’t many gourmet restaurants in Egypt and more specifically Alexandria,” Khalil, a native Alexandrian, tells SceneEats. “Whereas we have a few good examples of street food places that have successfully preserved their heritage like Mohamed Ahmed, we have nothing preserved from the gourmet dining scene of the city.”More than just a businessman, Khalil considers himself someone who has long been passionate about good food, having begun his business journey at the age of just 16 with a fish farm that distributed across Egypt. For someone like him, Trianon was both an attractive business opportunity and a chance to preserve a historic dining establishment with more cultural significance than most.

“Any businessman buying an existing restaurant will firstly seek a brand heritage and legacy,” Khalil tells us. “The Trianon brand carries prestige and nostalgia to Alexandrians as well as visitors from other cities in Egypt who come to Alexandria. It occupies a unique niche as one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious coffee shops, with a very unique interior that’s difficult to replicate anywhere else.” In Khalil’s view, this combination not only differentiates Trianon from modern restaurant chains, but makes it so that Trianon has limited direct competition even within the heritage café/restaurant segment.

Khalil decided to acquire a majority stake in Trianon, and discussed how to best attend to the restaurant’s needs with his new partners in the venture, Trianon’s previous owners. They decided on a new slogan together that underpins these changes: ‘Where Generations Meet’.“Trianon needed a new mindset to come in and see where things were going and what they could be, and that person is exactly Ahmed Tarek Khalil,” says Yasmine El Sahwy, whose grandparents were among the three Egyptian families who bought Trianon from its original Greek owners in the 1950s. Today, El Sahwy, her sister Sherine and their mother Magda Elhadary all remain involved in the operations of Trianon, with El Sahwy as its PR Manager. “There's no shame in saying that some parts of the restaurant needed attention or were falling apart, and that someone who truly valued the place like him was needed. He’s a very loyal Alexandrian.”

According to El Sahwy, the upgrades to Trianon encompassed everything from the waiters’ uniforms to the artworks on the wall. (“In addition to our original famous paintings,” El Sahwy says, “we now have contemporary pieces by very significant Egyptian artists.”) While they also upgraded the kitchen, the focus was not on revamping the menu but rather on allowing their kitchen staff to execute the same signature Trianon recipes with better quality.

Despite these changes, ‘modernizing’ is a word that El Sahwy completely rejects.
“A guest who enters the restaurant will definitely notice the difference, but is it ‘modernized’?” El Sahwy asks. “No. Our identity is our story, and this is not something we’re ever modernizing.” Instead, the exquisite quality they are seeking is the one once found in their past.While the renovation process finished in February 2026, the grand opening is still yet to come, as Khalil and his partners work on yet more finishing touches. In the meantime, however, Trianon is once more open to diners, and has recently hosted a welcome dinner for Dr. Guido W. Imbens, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

“He was coming to the Alexandria Bibliotheca to give an economics lecture and the organizers from the US reached out to us,” says El Sahwy, who accepted the invitation and put together the intimate dinner for the scholar’s first visit to the city. Fulfilling their new slogan, Trianon seized the opportunity to bring young Egyptian students to the dinner for a chance to talk with the Nobel laureate.

“Places like Trianon that are a part of Alexandria’s heritage are not just reserved for the old,” El Sahwy expresses. “They’re for all generations. We have the responsibility of improving it for everyone.”