Lebanon: What We Ate

As has been well established by science, Mediterranean food is the healthiest cuisine in the world. I would also argue that it is the most delicious. While Mexican food is definitely my favorite, if I had to pick one regional cuisine to eat for the rest of my life it would be Med all the way. And as is quickly becoming custom, we anchored our trip to Beirut with a food tour. We figured there was no better way to get us off the beaten track (safely) then having a local march us all around town and eating good food all along the way.

LAHMACUN: Our first stop was Ichkhanian Bakery for an Armenian flatbread called lahmacun (pronounced “lah-mah-joon.” The bakery set-up was pretty straightforward– a clay oven and a long wooden table. With a long wooden paddle, the lahmacuns went into the oven, came out of the oven, went onto a simple wood table, cooled for a minute, and then were quickly folded in half, slipped into paper, and handed off. We tried two types– the first, a pomegranate variety, with meat, pine nuts, and pomegranate sauce; the second was a traditional Armenian variety with finely minced meat and vegetables. I enjoyed both varieties but there is something about the sweet-tart tang of pomegranate anything that warms the cockles of my heart. The dough is super thin and develops a nice crispiness in the oven. It’s heavenly.

ATTAYEF:  Our second stop was a Lebanese bakery. We started with a quick bite of a lovely nut-based baklava, which mercifully did not involve honey (I am not a big fan of honey-drenched baklava. If you are going to have a sweet pastry with butter, let it at least be a bit crispy!) Our second taste was Attayef, a small, spongey pancake stuffed with Ashta cream, and sprinkled with pistachios. Ashta cream is similar to clotted cream, and doesn’t really taste like too much, so the bakery provides a bottle of simple syrup to dress your attayef to taste. Since the whole situation can get a bit messy, they passed around a plastic glove to use to eat the dripping pancake. Here are the plain pancakes:

And here is the product sans simple syrup– the pancakes are room temperature, and the cream is cold. Look at those beautiful crushed pistachios!

 

Other sweets for savoring, and the price list–

The shop sold jars of simple syrup, crushed nuts, and other toppings if you preferred to pick up pancakes and build-your-own at home:

FALAFEL: Of course you have heard of falafel– but this falafel was the lightest and fluffiest falafel I have ever eaten! Unlike most American recipes for falafel which use only chickpeas, this falafel is made with a mix of 70% chickpeas and 30% fava beans. All of the falafel shops had these beautiful fryers with a hammered bronze decorative base, an inset bowl with frying oil, and a ring to put the finished falafel on which would allow an excess oil to drip back into the basin. Exhibit A:

The falafel was served in a super-thin pita with sauce, pickled turnips, sliced radishes, and parsley. Perfection.

There were three falafel shops right in a row. Two of the falafel shops were owned by members of the same family and had the same name. One was briefly shut down by the health department, and lest you be confused, the shop that was NOT closed by the Health Department posted this sign in English and Arabic on its front door so you could properly identify the offending institution.

HONEY: When I was told the next stop would be to taste honey at a store called Atelier du Miel, my immediate reaction was ugh. I actively hate honey, it ruins everything! The shop’s schtick is that bees can be kept year round in Lebanon so long as you move the hives to wherever the weather is most favorable. In the wintertime, the hives live down on the coast and the bees feed on all the winter flowers. In the summertime, the bees live up in the mountains and feed on whatever is in bloom up there. So, seasonal honey. I think Beirut actually managed to outdo Brooklyn in hipsterness…which I didn’t think was possible.

We tasted the first few varieties of winter honeys served on little plastic sticks and while there were definitely perceptible differences between the flavors, they pretty much all tasted the same. And then, I put a spoon in my mouth, and thought, “WHAT ALCHEMY IS THIS?! THIS IS NOT HONEY!” In fact, it was honey, made by bees who fed entirely on loquat nectar. You guys, it was divine. We also tried some jam that was large junks of blackberries mixed with honey. It reminded me of my childhood PB&Js, but better. We bought both, left $35 poorer, and hoped to god they didn’t take our honey away from us at the airport.

 

ICE CREAM: If you google “Ice Cream” + Beirut, Hanna Mitri ice cream will be nine of the ten top results. At the time, however, we felt like we were being let in on a secret, as the ice cream shop was unmarked, nothing but a plain white room with three chest freezers, and oven, and mom (or grandma) chopping almond brittle while son and grandson scooped out ice cream. In the corner, a candle burned next to a picture of the man who started the ice cream shop. And the shop uses a fabulous vintage oven to bake the homemade brittle, pocked by shrapnel from Syria’s civil war:

 

There were two types of ice cream on offer, milk-based and sorbet. The milk-based ice creams were made without eggs or cream, so they were much less creamy and thick than gelato or regular American ice cream. I chose the almond brittle and pistachio varieties. Both were good, but after trying Severin’s sorbets– blood orange and lemon, it was obvious to me I chose the wrong path. The blood orange was delicious and slightly bitter, while the lemon was light, refreshing, and just the right amount of tartness. They were served in funny, flat, rectangular cones.

We stopped at a shawarma place and an olive oil stand next. Neither was particularly interesting or revolutionary so no photos.

MARKOOK BREAD – We ducked into a small shop in the Armenian neighborhood and picked up some Markook bread. It’s molded into a thin round circle using a pillow, then flipped onto a convex hot skillet where it cooks in just a minute. It’s then folded in on itself until it makes a triangle, wrapped in paper, and you’re good to go. The result is like a very thin and crispy crepe. We had a similar thing in Israel where it’s stuffed with labneh and called a Druze pita.

Before reaching our final stop on the food tour, we paused at a small shop with bunches of dehydrated vegetables hanging everywhere. In the photo below, there are dried eggplants, zucchini, and corn. Our last stop was at an Armenian restaurant called Restaurant Onno. One of the dishes we tried was rehydrated eggplant stuffed with meat, tomatoes, and rice. Honestly, I never would have known the eggplants were dehydrated except that they were quite small and the flavor slightly more intense than normal eggplant. One of my favorite dishes at the Armenian place was these tiny, thumbnail-sized meat dumplings that were baked until crisp and swimming in a delicious yogurt-based sauce.

 

That concludes the food tour. Some of the delicious meals not pictured here include a stop at a delicious taqueria owned by a guy from San Mateo (who did NOT look Lebanese, but we didn’t get his full story). We also had a delicious but very expensive meal at Baron with bacon-wrapped dates, a whole roast cauliflower topped with pomegranate arils, fish curry, beef tacos, and a pork dish which I have now forgotten. We had a buffet breakfast out in which I was introduced to the joy that was labneh (which I think would be a great substitute for cream cheese on a bagel).

Another food highlight was our lunch at Feniqia in Byblos, which was recommended to us by a friend. The meal started with corn nuts and fresh peanuts (Lebanon has the best nuts ever) and one other kind of nut I can’t remember because I didn’t eat. Then they brought out these small thin breads that looked like tortillas but with a slightly different texture, plus labneh, olives, and za’atar with olive oil. All of this arrived on a wood board with a large iron knob on it. As it turns out, the knob was stuffed with coals and if you left your flatbread on it, it’d make it crispy and delicious. The picture below also has our side of mutabal, which is what we’d called baba ghanoush in the United States. (There seems to be quite a dispute on the internet about what baba ghanoush actually is– I guess in the Levant baba ghanoush is a smoky eggplant dip with parsley, walnuts, tomatoes, and pomegranate molasses. Interesting).

 

Our hot knob stayed that way the whole meal, which was super awesome. The restaurant ended up bringing us beef shawarma instead of beef kebab (:-() which was still ok. It was served with a mess of parsley, a baked potato with extra crispy skin, pickled turnips (which do not taste as good plain as they do on a falafel!), roast tomatoes and cauliflower, and a little lettuce.

 

Unsurprisingly, Lebanon did not disappoint in terms of having heaps of delicious food. Even the nuts at the hotel bar were the best nuts I’ve ever tasted (I think they were Iranian pistachios, which is probably why). I don’t think we had a single bad meal the entire three days we were there. That’s what I call winning!

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