Books@Café is the original and still the best of Amman's lifestyle cafes — a multi-level space on Rainbow Street combining a secondhand English-language bookshop, a cafe, a restaurant, and a bar, open from morning to midnight. It opened in the 1990s and was one of the first places in Amman where you could drink wine in a comfortable, mixed-gender setting without the atmosphere of a hotel bar.
The books are genuinely good — a rotating stock of fiction, travel writing, and non-fiction in English — and the food is solid international cafe fare. The terrace on the upper level has views down the hillside. It functions as a social anchor for Amman's expat and English-speaking Jordanian community, and is a reliable place to get orientation, recommendations, or just a quiet drink.