But the policy has met with little success because many Egyptians are now working late to deal with backlogs that mounted during the protests or to scrabble for more business as the economy stutters.
"They also have to consider traffic and reaching home before curfew," said Ismail.
With fewer people to entertain, some in the industry are looking around for day jobs.
"To scrape a living, I am offering Afro braids, which is a rare service here, for both men and women," said DJ Sugar.
GOING WEST
A belly dancer who goes by the stage name Laila has seen 15 weddings canceled.
"I don't see any weddings coming until the curfew is lifted," she said. "For now I have no back-up income so I'm traveling to the U.S. for a month to teach belly dancing."
Some struggling entertainers have taken to negotiating with Egypt's military rulers to allow customers to keep partying through the curfew.
"I had to present it as a tourism issue because I was broke and I needed cash," said Kojak, who organizes parties at one of a handful of night clubs allowed to stay open through the night.
"I had to be brave, and someone had to start it, so I built networks with the military to ensure my clients arrive home safely during the curfew," he said.
Some night clubbers are defying the curfew, seeing the prospect of an evening indoors as too mournful to contemplate.
"I feel safe now because I know it's calming down in the country," said female club-goer Rony as she sipped a cocktail and bobbed her head to the beat of trance music.
By 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night, she was the only woman at a nightclub in Cairo's central Garden City neighborhood.
"I'm telling people not to be scared," she said. "There are many checkpoints where the army stops you on your way home, but all they ask for is your ID and they smile."
Nightclubs in poorer areas were hit by vandals during the uprising, dealing a fatal blow to some. A row of cheap nightclubs and casinos on Haram (Pyramid) Street stands empty more than two months after they were ransacked.
Workers at El Leil (The Night) casino said thieves took 1.5 million Egyptian pounds ($251,900), kitchen appliances and one of its main doors.
Owners of the clubs have built a brick wall topped with shards of glass to protect the buildings, which stand empty.
"There are 500 workers here, all of them jobless now. Even belly dancers now work as house maids," said casino security guard Abdel Rahim Shahata.