Tabbouleh or Fattoush?
My first impression of Beirut was the Dunkin Donuts in the departures area of the airport. As I stumbled past baggage claim, it brought me up short. I wasn’t expecting to see a Dunkin during this trip. I certainly wasn’t expecting one with the exact layout and placement as the one in Boston’s Logan airport. After 15 hours of exhausting travel, it was comforting and jarring at the same time.
My second impression was the view from the airport parking lot of Beirut itself: Palm trees, rolling hills covered in white apartment buildings, mountains in the distance.
“Oh, it seems very Mediterranean,” I thought.
Looking at Google Maps, I realize now that I had that epiphany standing a few hundred feet from the Mediterranean itself. However, that mistake is understandable. Like a lot of us, I didn’t really have a mental picture of Beirut.
I’ve started a new job that involves working with a talented software engineering team based in Lebanon. In early March, it made sense to visit them. I received a few concerned texts and emails from family and friends. For a lot of Americans (myself very much included), Lebanon is a place you read about in newspaper headlines, not see on travel shows. I didn’t have the kind of mental picture for Beirut that I might have for other cities I’ve never been but have seen many times, like Rome.
I’m obviously aware of the issues plaguing Lebanon, but I work every day with dozens of people who live and work there. It was hard to view it as overly foreign or dangerous looking at pictures from last month’s bowling night. I asked my business partner, who is Lebanese, for any travel advice or major social differences, and all she offered was “Eh, It’s rude to turn down food if someone offers it to you.”
That danger hit me the first night. A few hours after leaving the airport I was heading to a company-wide dinner at Kun, an upscale restaurant in the heart of the fancier part of downtown Beirut.
Dinner that night was traditional mezze, a selection of small plates. I barely had time to snack from a bowl of nuts before plates of food started to hit the table. In all, sixteen dishes came out before the main course. Some of the foods would be familiar to anyone who has ever gotten “Middle Eastern” food of any variety in America. Hummus, richer and creamier than I could imagine, crispy balls of kibbeh, and diced fried potatoes tossed with garlic and cilantro. Some things were brand new to me, like sigara boregi, crispy cheese-filled cigarettes, or sujuk, a spicy fresh Armenian sausage. There were multiple plates of meat (chicken livers, minced lamb, and small sweet sausages) tossed with pomegranate molasses. I’ve never really liked tabbouleh, which I’ve found bland and bitter. The vividly green chopped parsley salad on the table, however, was fresh and sweet and deserved to be eaten by the bucketful. Everything was served with saj, a thin, crepe-like bread that the waiters replaced as soon as a basket started to get cold. It was only THEN the restaurant’s speciality - extremely Instagrammable roast chickens - were brought out.
Sitting down at a table with a table of mostly 20-something Lebanese tech workers, I was subject to about 400 food opinions. I was quickly told I needed to pick a side between the two core salads of Lebanese cuisine: Tabbouleh or Fattoush (a sumac-dressed salad of lettuce, tomato, and fried bread). Each side waxed rhapsodic over their favorite and lobbied me by piling more on my plate. Most of my coworkers were fattoush fans but – sorry guys – I’m still thinking about that tabbouleh. I asked for Lebanese red wine and was bullied into ordering Araq, the Lebanese version of the anise-flavored spirit with other variations around the Mediterranean. Well, technically they just served me both. About an hour and a half in I broke the one cardinal rule. A colleague urged me to have more chicken and I begged off, saying I was too full. My partner turned to me, laughing, and said, “I told you ONE thing! And now you turn down this food!” On the ride home, the jet lag, food, and araq had me dazed. I started telling my driver about the meal. He interrupted me emphatically, “Ah, tabbouleh, it is the HEART of the table!!”
I had started a company-wide riot the week before my trip by asking in the team Slack “where should I eat shawarma when I visit.” This question is so contentious that the debate is STILL GOING ON a month after my trip. My second night, a few folks who were also working late said tonight would be a good night to get some. Since it was a Tuesday, I couldn’t get shawarma the true way – around 1 am after drinking all night. But we could stop for a cocktail on the way.
I walked into JIVE, a bar near my guest house in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood, and felt extremely at home. That entire neighborhood is famous for cafes, art galleries, shops, and restaurants. If dinner the night before had been in the Midtown of Beirut, this was Williamsburg. Except for the copious amounts of cigarette smoke, Jive would have fit in perfectly on any Brooklyn street. Soul music blared from a vintage record player behind the bar. I skipped past the negroni sbagliato on the menu before settling on an Atay Party, a combination of rum, passion fruit, mint, spices, and tea. It tasted like a Mai Tai’s older brother.
After a few drinks and definitely, 100%, absolutely ZERO cigarettes, it was shawarma time. My next stop was Basturma Mano in the Armenian part of town. While no one thought this was the BEST shawarma, there was a general consensus that it was *important* shawarma and a decent place to take me. Cones of meat spun and sizzled while jaunty, white-uniformed men deftly carved slices. First up was a standard chicken, but served “tarboosh”, with a dollop of the pungent garlic sauce toum (tarboosh is also the term for fez). This wasn’t an overflowing gloppy mess the way shawarma often is here in the States. It was a small, tight wrap stuffed with freshly shaved meat and a few vegetables. The chicken was heavily seasoned and the tarboosh took that to 11, bringing a LOT of garlic flavor and some welcome moisture.
Since these shawarma were smaller, eating two wasn’t a huge deal. Next up was sujuk, the same spicy Armenian sausage from my first night, which had the texture and flavor of a spicy hot dog (in the best possible way). The juicier sausage made for a more balanced sandwich.
As we prepared to leave, I said I would have liked to have tried the basturma since that is in the name of the restaurant. Before I could say “next time” one appeared before me. Basturma shares an etymology and overall flavor profile with pastrami, but texturally it’s very different. Like pastrami, beef is cured with salt and spiced, but then the meat is dried to concentrate the flavor. For the shawarma, slices of basturma were shaved into the sandwich. It came on a small panini-pressed baguette instead of a pita. Toast with dried meat and vegetables was, as you might imagine, a bit dry. One of my companions said she liked it with mayonnaise, which would have improved it, but the flavor was outstanding. If my stomach felt great about two shawarma, three was a stretch. I quietly tucked half of it back into the bag as we got int he car, though I did finish it back at my hotel once I could get more water.
My final day started with a traditional Lebanese breakfast of olives, breads, yogurts, and cheeses at a coworker's parents’ house (Lactaid, take the wheel). Then we took a company-wide bus trip to Betron and Byblos, two of the oldest cities in the world and common Lebanese tourist destinations. Once again, I was struck by how familiar it all felt. We were walking through beautiful old souks - 3000-year old neighborhoods of alleys and sandstone buildings unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But we were also visiting old churches, stores selling locally-made products, and fish restaurants advertising $15 set lunch menus. I might have been in any tourist-heavy European village.
I begged off a final night out with colleagues – my flight the next morning was pre-sunrise. After packing, I ducked out to explore Rue Gouraud. If Gemmayzeh is Williamsburg, then Rue Gouraud is Bedford Ave. Film-themed cocktail bars abutted art galleries next to pubs with Chelsea kits on the wall. I settled on a quiet early dinner at the bar of Un Peu Fou, a restaurant that I’ve had a hard time describing. It was definitely Lebanese - the tomato, stracciatella, and olive-oil sorbet salad I had seemed like a play on the ubiquitous fattoush. Steak in pepper sauce was deeply French. But fried calamari with freeze-dried tomato powder? All I can think of to describe the place is “Brooklyn-y”. There was a manifesto on the back of the menu, for pete’s sake! The meal, combined with a few different glasses of Lebanese wines, were a fantastic close to the trip.
In many ways, Beirut felt very familiar, which I guess means very Western. Stores were full of all the normal things I might need and my company’s offices at a cool live-work coworking space look… like those kinds of offices anywhere. The temperate weather and my coworkers kvetching about parking reminded me of Los Angeles. However, even though I was in a upscale part of town I saw regular evidence of the ongoing financial and government crises. There were regular blackouts each afternoon, with our fancy coworking space going dark for 30-60 seconds before the generators kicked in. Traffic signals, laws, or enforcement were nonexistent (froggering across a major street was the single scariest part of my trip). Credit cards aren’t accepted. I had to bring a decent amount of cash from the States and use that to pay for everything, sometimes in USD and sometimes debating the exchange rate for Lebanese lira (the official rate is far below the street rate). It was a weird experience to debate the cost of an espresso in a tech company lobby coffee shop and then sip it during a blackout that everyone around you is treating as business as usual.
All that said – with my privilege firmly checked – I had a fantastic time. The architecture was beautiful. The bars and restaurants were creative, ambitious, and occasionally weird. Friends and strangers alike were deeply enthusiastic that I was there and eager to show off (and fight over) the things they liked best about the city. I didn’t leave hungry, but I left hungry to come back.
Out of Context J. Gold Quote of the Week
By the time I could afford to eat there once in a while, I was already on to Cantonese seafood and Taylor's steaks instead, and the first-wave Argentine places like Don Felipe on Western somehow seemed more soulful than I imagined Gardel's to be; realer, less expensive. Also, undeniably, not quite as good.
My mouth is legit watering. Sounds like a great trip!
What a delicious read! My son’s girlfriend is Armenian & her dad grew up in Beirut. She comes to Rome for visits with a suitcase full of Sujak & sumac (I love fatoush) & the best dried apricots in the land!