Flatbread with thyme, out of a bakery oven, before nine in the morning. The best cheap breakfast in the Mediterranean.
A furn is a neighbourhood bakery with a large gas or wood-fired oven, and it is where Lebanon has breakfast.
A manousheh — plural manaeesh — is a round of dough, stretched thin, topped, and pushed into that oven on a peel for a minute or two.
It costs very little, it takes two minutes, and it is one of the best things to eat anywhere on the Mediterranean.
What to order
Zaatar. The default and the classic. A mix of dried wild thyme, sumac, toasted sesame and salt, stirred into olive oil and spread over the dough. It comes out fragrant, slightly sour from the sumac, and dark green.
Ask for it with mint and tomato and olives folded in — bi na’na w banadoura — and eat it folded like a wrap. This is what to do the first time.
Jibneh. Cheese — usually akkawi, sometimes with a little kashkaval — which melts and browns.
Cocktail or half-and-half. Half zaatar, half cheese, folded together. Every Lebanese person has a view on whether this is correct.
Lahm baajine or sfiha. Minced lamb with tomato, onion, pine nuts and pomegranate molasses, spread thin. Heavier, and usually eaten later in the day.
Kishk. Fermented cracked wheat and yoghurt, dried, powdered and mixed with oil. Sour, earthy, and an acquired taste that is worth acquiring.
Awarma — lamb confit — with egg, for the serious version.
Fatayer — small triangular pastries with spinach, or sambousek with cheese or meat.
How it works
You order at the counter, they make it, and you wait. There are usually no tables; you eat standing at the counter or on the street.
Ayran or laban to drink, or a coffee from the shop next door.
Prices are trivial. Even with the currency collapse, a manousheh is among the cheapest hot food in the country and is what a great many people live on.
Where
Any neighbourhood. That is the point — there is a furn on almost every street, and the good one is the one with a queue at eight in the morning.
Bliss Street by AUB for the student version.
Hamra, Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael and Badaro all have long-established bakeries.
Barbar in Hamra is open around the clock and is the standard late-night answer, though it is a large operation rather than a neighbourhood furn.
The rest of the street food
Ka’ak — the sesame bread ring shaped like a handbag, sold from glass-sided carts on the Corniche and at street corners, split and filled with picon cheese or zaatar. This is the other essential.
Shawarma, chicken or lamb, with garlic toum for the chicken and tahini for the meat. Lebanese chicken shawarma with toum is a genuinely distinct thing and the garlic sauce is the reason.
Falafel, which in Lebanon is made with both chickpeas and fava beans and is served in a wrap with pickled turnip.
Foul and balila — stewed fava beans and chickpeas with lemon, garlic and cumin, eaten for breakfast from a specialist shop.
Knafeh — semolina pastry over melted cheese, soaked in syrup, served inside a sesame bread roll for breakfast, which sounds implausible and is correct.
Sahlab in winter, and jallab and ayran in summer.
More Food & Drink
Souk el Tayeb
A Saturday farmers' market that started as an attempt to get Lebanese from every sect to stand in the same place.
Mezze and the Long Lunch
Thirty small dishes, arak with water and ice, and four hours at the table. This is what Lebanon does better than anyone.