Thirty small dishes, arak with water and ice, and four hours at the table. This is what Lebanon does better than anyone.
Lebanese food is one of the great cuisines of the world and it is easy to eat badly if you order it like a European meal. The format matters as much as the dishes.
How it works
Mezze is a large number of small plates, brought to the table in waves, shared by everyone, over several hours.
Nobody has their own dish. You order for the table, generously, and it keeps arriving. Bread is constant. The table fills up and stays full.
The order of service is roughly: cold mezze, then hot mezze, then — if anyone is still capable — grilled meat, then fruit, then coffee.
Do not order a main course. The mezze is the meal.
The cold dishes
Hummus, made properly — smooth, heavily tahini-forward, warm olive oil, and not the fridge-cold paste sold abroad.
Moutabbal — grilled aubergine with tahini, smoky. (Baba ghanoush in Lebanon usually means a chopped aubergine salad, which is different.)
Tabbouleh. This is the one visitors get wrong. Lebanese tabbouleh is overwhelmingly parsley, chopped very fine, with tomato, mint, lemon and olive oil, and only a small amount of bulgur — a handful, not a base. If it arrives as a grain salad with some herbs in it, you are in the wrong restaurant.
Fattoush — salad with sumac, purslane and fried or toasted bread.
Labneh with olive oil and mint. Shanklish, aged cheese rolled in zaatar. Makdous, baby aubergines stuffed with walnut and garlic in oil.
Warak enab — vine leaves, rolled thin, cooked with lemon.
Kibbeh nayyeh — raw lamb or beef pounded with bulgur and spices, eaten with olive oil, onion and mint. The great Lebanese Sunday dish, and if you eat raw meat anywhere, eat it here, where the butchery for it is taken extremely seriously.
The hot dishes
Kibbeh — fried torpedoes of bulgur shell around spiced lamb and pine nuts.
Rekakat — cheese rolls. Sambousek and fatayer — meat and spinach pastries.
Batata harra — potatoes with coriander, garlic and chilli.
Foul moukala, loubieh bzeit — green beans in oil.
Frog’s legs, sujuk, makanek — small spiced sausages — and soujouk with pomegranate molasses.
Grilled halloumi, and jibneh mishwiyeh.
The grill
Shish taouk — marinated chicken with toum, the emulsified garlic sauce that is one of Lebanon’s great contributions to eating.
Lahm meshwi, kafta, and riyash — lamb chops.
Arak
The drink, and it belongs with this food specifically.
Arak is grape distillate flavoured with aniseed, distilled three times and traditionally aged in clay. It is around 50 per cent alcohol.
How to drink it: one part arak, roughly two parts water, poured in that order — arak first, then water, which turns it milky white, then ice last. Putting ice in before the water is said to ruin it, and every Lebanese person at the table will tell you so.
It is sipped through the meal, not drunk before it. The aniseed cuts the oil and the lemon in the food, which is why the pairing works.
Lebanese wine is also excellent and under-known — the Bekaa Valley has been making it since Phoenician times, and Château Musar, Ksara, Kefraya and Massaya are all worth ordering.
Where
Anywhere good, and there are many. Beirut is not a city where you need a list.
The traditional experience is out of the city: a mezze house in the mountains above Beirut, in Broummana, Beit Mery, Bikfaya or the Chouf, on a terrace, on a Sunday, for four hours. If you can arrange that, do.
Zaitunay Bay and downtown are the expensive end. Badaro, Mar Mikhael, Hamra and Gemmayzeh all have good places at every level.
Practical
It is not a quick lunch. Book the afternoon.
Portions are large and Lebanese hosts order too much on purpose. Do not attempt to finish everything.
Prices vary enormously and the currency situation makes menus confusing — see how much Beirut costs.
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