As heavenly as the Mediterranean is said to be over the food, look at Lebanon’s soil here. Lebanese cuisine, the pinnacle of millennia-old then-present, is being refurbished with sophistication, creativity, and newness of richness of culture. Lebanese mezze-to-haute-plating cuisine, food has been reinvigorated by chefs as experience—local and world.
Me.zze, the Lebanese temperament. Not order of appetizers, but attitude. Spectacle of culture, looks, sensuality, and receiving. Camaraderie and hospitality are textures of the culture, where food is to satisfy the eye first before satisfying the taste. Restaurants such as Beirut’s Joseph’s are unapologetic expression of this ethic. Owner head chef has been seen and caught making intricate meals with fresh herbs and just-picked local vegetables and fruits that not only taste delicious but are also healthy to consume.
In Joseph’s, the flavor is of the fanciful kind. Hummus, by the way, the restaurant specialty, has towering height in the guise of za’atar and olive oil toppings tastefully arranged so Lebanon’s color and texture can be seen. Red beets, red roasted peppers, and indigenous herbs are piled atop in a tower, more for show than for taste, but more for presentation of edible bite-sized units representative of the country.
Such visual correlative is also imitated by other chefs such as Maya, who employs the new plating concept in re-creating traditional dishes. Traditional dishes such as kibbeh and tabbouleh are re-created in sculpted bite-sizes. Her meals are prepared in symmetry, layering, and color utilization so that dining is an experience with active stimulation of more than one sense. Instead of waiting to be served, Maya invites everyone to each meal as an open invitation to get in there and be a part of new Lebanese food history.
Khaled, the Lebanese fast-food franchise, uses a story mode of presentation and mood. They put food in them in signed trays and hand-painted bowls so they infuse richness and depth to culture into the food. Khaled uses Lebanese mythology and folklore in foods so the consumer can experience heritage over and over again with modality.
They are a new breed of Lebanese food entrepreneurs who take Middle Eastern culinary heritage with them wherever they go around the globe. Their foods, ancient and traditional in ingredients but far from being old-fashioned in presentation, have interested restaurants all over the place. Foreign chefs and foreign cooking borrow Lebanese methods as examples and still look up to them, looking for taste harmonies, texture harmonies, and sight harmonies so that room is left for creating new forms of culinary presentation.
Mezze as gastronomic pleasure is the only one that can be likened to the variety and vigor of Lebanese food. Characterized by dense ancient heritage, contemporary food opens up to revolution but always treads the thin line between innovation and fidelity. Derivative in its contemporary incarnation but continuing—those Lebanese cooks: an hedonistic sensory pleasure to be shared with others.
This is an ode to Lebanon’s gastronomic supremacy in global politics. This is the manner, old-fashioned and new-fashioned in taste, in which food can be necessity and story—a vehicle through which country personality, past and future, are converging all at once.
