No Middle East city having yet been featured in 10 Do's and Don'ts, I jumped on the opportunity to ask Salma Abdelnour to offer her take on Beirut which is the main character in her recently published memoir Jasmine and Fire 'A Bittersweet Year in Beirut' (Broadway Books-Random House, June 2012).
Beirut 10 Do’s and Don’ts By Salma Abdelnour
Do's
-Before you head to any
restaurant, bar, club, shop, or obscure art gallery in Beirut, make sure you
find out what city landmark it’s near—for instance, is it next door to a famous
old hotel, across from a big theater, or behind a historic café? Beirutis,
obsessed though they may be by the trendiest new thing, tend to give directions
by referring to famous old sites—never mind if those places haven’t actually
been open for decades. Street names and building numbers are mostly irrelevant
in Beirut, since you’ll rarely find signs with useful information like that.
Landmarks are usually all you have to go by. Looking for the new February 30 bar? It’s in a little
alleyway near the old Liban Poste building in Hamra. Want to find The Gathering restaurant? It’s down
the street from the electric company headquarters, aka “shirket al kahraba,” in
Gemmayzeh.
- Get to The Gathering (see above) early in the
evening, i.e. before 8pm, if you want to luck into a table for dinner. The name
makes it sound like a ‘70s cult, but the restaurant is uber-hip, combining an
Italian trattoria, a wine bar, and a salumeria in a trio of gorgeously
renovated old Lebanese houses set around a breezy courtyard. The food is
fantastic—made with mostly organic local ingredients—and the design is
super-cool, and everyone wants to be there; alas the place doesn’t take
reservations.
- Have lunch at Tawlet, (some dishes above) where each day the offerings focus on a different region of Lebanon, and are
likely to include dishes you won’t see in any other restaurant in Beirut. The
lunches (Tawlet is not open for dinner) are served on an abundant buffet
counter in the sunny dining room, and owner Kamal Mouzawak—who is also responsible
for starting the Souk El Tayeb
farmer’s market downtown on Saturdays—walks around greeting guests. If you’re
feeling more adventurous, take a daytrip to the new sister-restaurant Tawlet Ammiq
in the Bekaa Valley.
- Stop by Saifi Gardens, in an
out-of-the-way corner of the Gemmayzeh neighborhood, where you’ll find a mellow
Lebanese café called Em Nazih
overlooking a pleasant garden. Directly above the café (climb a few flights of
stairs) is a rooftop bar called Coop D’Etat
which, unlike many bars in Gemmayzeh, attracts a cool crowd more interested in
kicking back over drinks and local indie-band music than in dressing up and
getting sloppy-hammered.
- Take a walk through the
Mar Mikhael neighborhood and hit some of the eclectic hangouts there: for
instance Internazionale,
a new bar that has on one of its walls a giant mural showing the inside of a
crowded 1960s Alitalia flight, complete with cigarette-puffing passengers.
- If you plan on treating
a group of friends to dinner, secretly slip your credit card to the maître d’
as soon as you walk into the restaurant. The Lebanese can be generous to a
fault, and they’ll often fight over who gets to pay the bill—and if you speak
up a nanosecond too late, you’ll lose. In some cities on Earth, this would all
sound very puzzling. But in Beirut it’s normal: People like to play host. More
and more lately, people will agree to split the bill—especially if they’re a
group in the habit of dining together. But if you’re intent on inviting your
friends out and picking up the tab, be quick on the draw.
- Try to sneak into the American University of Beirut campus
(you technically need a campus I.D. to get in), or take a stroll through the
Sanayeh Gardens nearby. Besides the Corniche—the wide boulevard along the
Mediterranean—those are among the very few outdoor pedestrian spaces with
actual trees and flowers still left in Beirut.
- Try knafeh (below) , a cakelike
breakfast dish made with a sweet crumbly dough topped with melted white cheese
and sugar syrup—and usually eaten wrapped in sesame bread. It sounds insanely
rich. It is. But don’t miss it. It’s a classic Lebanese confection and deserves
the reverence locals attach to it. Have it on a day when you’re willing to
start with the heaviest meal first—and to postpone lunch for a few hours.
- Get around and see as
many neighborhoods as you can in Beirut, from Burj Hammoud, the mazelike
Armenian neighborhood on the east side, to Basta, a flea-market-filled area to
the west—and beyond. Beirut is hard to sum up. It’s best to experience as many
varied and seemingly contradictory parts of it as you can before even trying to
get a handle on the place.
- Swim. If it’s summer,
buy a day-pass at one of the beach clubs along the Corniche, for instance the
retro Sporting, the fancier Riviera Beach, or the (pictured below) super-sceney La Plage.
(They all have rocky beaches, well-maintained pools, and outdoor cocktail
bars.) If you’d prefer to swim at a sandy beach, head south to Jiyeh or to
Tyre, which has beautiful public beaches that you can wade into even in winter.
Don'ts
- In Beirut, don’t even
try to arrive right on time for dinner or drinks. You’ll be the first one there
by a longshot. But if, say, you’re going to a concert or performance and the
announced starting time is “8pm sharp,” that usually means around 8:30—although
it can occasionally mean 8pm sharp, for real. It’s a gamble. Usually no one in
Beirut takes an exact start-time seriously. But you might want to call ahead to
find out what the consequences of lateness might be. (For instance, people have
been known to arrive at 8:15pm to a dance performance that actually started at
8pm sharp, and get sent away with no refund.)
- Don’t turn down an
offer of something to eat or drink if you’re visiting Lebanese people in their
home. At least accept a glass of water. The Lebanese are hard-wired to ply you
with food and drink, and an all-out rejection of their efforts to give you
things—things you may not actually want or need—will be seen as a failure to
please you. Don’t try to see the logic in this. There is none.
- Don’t worry about
sending a thank-you note if you’ve received a gift or you’ve been taken out to
dinner. The Lebanese don’t really do thank-you notes, but a phone call or a
return invitation is always appreciated—and sending a bouquet of flowers to
someone’s home is a sweet (though unnecessary) gesture if you’ve been
especially bowled over by an act of generosity or hospitality.
- Try not to panic if
you hear alarming shot-like noises or booms around you, unless everyone else
seems to be panicking. Given Lebanon’s history, past and present, panic often
seems like a wise response, but there are lots of things in Beirut that go
boom—construction sounds, cars whose engines are held together by thread and
scotch tape, and the ever-popular recreational fireworks. Don’t be careless
about where you go in Beirut or elsewhere in the country if there’s political
trouble brewing, but don’t get needlessly worked up over the city’s hyper-noisy
everyday soundscape.
- Don’t expect to get
through an entire elevator ride without shuddering to a stop midway through.
The electricity shuts down for a few hours each day across the city, on a
rotating basis: morning, midday, or afternoon. Many buildings and nearly all
hotels have generators, but there are frequent hiccups and blackouts. The
electric company headquarters (see Do #1 above) is a major city landmark, but
locals often wonder what exactly goes on inside that building.
- Make sure not to miss
out on taking a daytrip outside Beirut. You’ll no doubt already have the
ancient Roman ruins in Baalbeck and the historic city of Byblos on your
itinerary, but try to hit more relaxing destinations too, like the coastal
towns of Amsheet (pictured below) and Batroun, north of Beirut. Beautiful old houses, winding
little streets, and a seaside setting make for a gorgeous escape that will make
you forget Beirut’s urban chaos for a few hours.
- Never assume a
one-way street in Beirut is in fact a one-way street. Ever. Look both ways, and
also up, down, front, back—any direction you can think of. Keep a keen eye out
for motorcycles and mopeds, which seem to drop out of the sky.
- Don’t expect anyone
or anything to stop at a red light or a stop sign. Lately, traffic cops (who
ever knew Beirut had traffic cops?) have been turning up to give the occasional
ticket when someone runs a red light, but not often enough to convince people
to change their driving habits so dramatically.
- As of September 2012,
it’s illegal to smoke in restaurants, bars, and enclosed public spaces—so don’t
light up unless you want to test your luck. How strongly will this law be
enforced? Remains to be seen.
- No need to fret if
you haven’t had a chance to pick up presents for everyone back home before you
leave Lebanon. The shopping at the Beirut airport is actually quite good:
You’ll find locally made artisanal textiles and clothing, a well-stocked Virgin
bookstore, and Lebanese pastries galore, attractively packaged to give out to
(sure-to-be-thrilled) friends.
Read more from Salma on Jasmine and Fire blog.
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