fishing boats
I love the guy in the white vest and shorts. I bet he has a moustache. It was a lot warmer a couple of weeks ago when I took this shot. Looking at it now makes me shiver.
I love having visitors here. It’s a wonderful thing to share Lebanon with them, especially when they are first-time visitors with so many surprises in store. Apart from helping them discover a fantastic new country, I also enjoy the whiff of a former home they bring with them.
It has been over ten years since I left the UK, so although I stick out like a sore thumb here, I don’t feel especially English any more either. When I went to university, got my first full-time job, filed my first tax form, and even spent three months on the dole, it was all abroad.
But the last time visitors came over from England I was struck by just how like them I was. Observing their reactions and habits, I felt like I was looking at a mirror image of myself when I arrived in Lebanon. And one of the main areas where this stood out was at the table.
The Lebanese approach to meals is different in so many subtle ways. It’s not just the ingredients that differ. I was used to that before coming here. But it took longer to get used to eating dinner with a near-empty plate. Faced with a tantalising mezze of different dishes, polite Brit that I am, I served myself a plate with a little of everything and then set about eating what was on my plate. Note the possessive article.
But it gradually seeped into my consciousness that that’s not the way it’s done. For a start a great deal of mouthfuls go straight from dish to mouth, scooped up with bread or a fork for individual pieces like stuffed vine leaves. When it is occasionally put to use, the plate is just a brief pause on the way. Often on the way to someone else’s mouth.
Such communal eating means you don’t really have your own serving. For a long time I worried whether I was taking too much of this dish or that. You just can’t keep track of how much you’ve eaten when it trickles past you in that sneaky way. But that’s the beauty of the mezze. If the fried rikkakat run out you just order more. Instead of that very British concept of fairness and a proprietary view of MY serving, you have an insistence on sharing. Instead of working to finish your plate, people keep an eye on feeding each other, frequently passing dishes and telling their friends: “You’re not eating anything!” Which is rarely true.
This does mean that when your host directs a mountain of batenjane piled high on a fold of bread directly towards your mouth it is hard not to think about whether you might accidentally salivate on his fingers. The strict British rules on eating instruments (fork in the left hand only!) do have something going for them.
Recently I was invited to a new restaurant down by Saint George Marina which has pulled of a combination of the communal mezze and the individualist own dish. It’s called Zabad, meaning ‘foam’, as in white-tipped waves. What was interesting at Zabad was not only the unusual flavour combinations (arak and fennel, martini and cardamom as aperitifs) but the choice of presentation for the opening week. It was like an individual mezze for each diner. At least eight or nine plates were set in front of me in turn, each bearing a tiny but beautiful new course.
It was a novel mix of eastern and western approaches which reminded us of a restaurant we dined at a few years back in Paris, Liza. Only later did I find out that the Lebanese chef behind it opened several restaurants in Paris before Zabad (his first here in Lebanon) and worked at Liza too.
Though I’m still puzzled about the restaurant’s cutlery choices – where did the spork come from?
Disclaimer in case you were wondering: I don’t do “reviews” for Le Gray (but just fyi, Beirut is Back) or Zabad or anyone for that matter. Nothing links me to Zabad in any way.
We thought we were quite brave going up in the cable car to Harissa with a baby. This tin bucket looks scarier.
I can just imagine the soundtrack: Rj3a, rj3a!
These guys are just fearless.
here am I sitting in a tin can
And here’s what they are working on. The modern church behind the monument-chapel is said to have been designed as a cross between a cedar and a Phoenician ship.
I'm floating in a most peculiar way
I guess the upside is that they have an even better view than us.
view from the cable car
As I write, half of Beirut is in the supermarket stocking up for the weekend. The experience will be hurried and crowded and reminiscent of this time last year and every big holiday before that, when the same shoppers swore, “Never again.”
But there are a couple of variations on the theme, because there are two types of supermarket in the city. There’s the gleaming new complexes with floors so clean you could eat your purchases off them, the type that I wrote about previously. Then there are the local supermarkets, a bit smaller, somewhat cheaper, and a lot more higgledy piggledy.
If you were to wake up from some deep sleep in one of the glam superstores, it would take you a while to work out you were in Lebanon, surrounded as you are by American cake mixes, Australian mangoes, Marmite and rice vinegar.
But the second kind, as my astute brother-in-law put it, is Beirut in miniature. The aisles weave between generously overladen shelves, and when the shelves run out the goods are stacked on the floor, piles of tins listing gently towards vats of olives, which are double parked alongside the crates of eggs. Shoppers squeeze through narrow gaps only to find themselves up against a wall of flat bread or of toilet rolls in a dead end having to reverse out.
Here and there, with the Bonne Maman conserve and Hershey’s chocolate bars, you happen upon an incongruous touch of the west just like in the city at large. Bystanders – who can only be staff – tap their cigarettes on ashtrays and chat and watch the comings and goings just as the military men on the streets watch and wait and smoke.
And as in town there’s always someone to help out with directions; in the Hikme branch of Charcutier Aoun its a kindly gentleman who greets you as you descend the stairs to the lower level, eager to make your shopping experience more successful by guiding you around the goods. He’ll even help you park your trolley if you need it.
The cold bright weather has been fantastic for walks – like this wonderful coastal promenade near Solidere that my in-laws introduced us to.
a small boy against a big backdrop
Just head north of the Beirut Souks across a bit of wasteland and some heaps of gravel, past the little guard hut with the guard feeding a cat, until you get to a stick man reaching for the sky. In the middle of nowhere, but in the centre of town.
stick man
