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The Road to Beirut – Where Memory Meets the Table
The Road to Beirut:
Where Memory Meets the Table
A culinary pilgrimage through Lebanon — from the kitchens of central Beirut to a clifftop restaurant where the sea does the talking.
By the Founders of CERU
Beirut, Autumn 2019 (6 min read )
There are journeys you plan, and journeys that plan you. Our trip to Lebanon in the autumn of 2019 was, without question, the latter. Patricia and I had been talking about going for years — the country had long existed in our imagination as a kind of culinary mythology: cedar-scented mountains, mezze that arrived in waves, wines of surprising elegance, and a people who, regardless of whatever history had thrown at them, seemed constitutionally incapable of setting a bad table. When we finally bought the tickets — along with two of our chefs from CERU — none of us quite knew what we were walking into. We only knew we were hungry for it.
We flew from London on a clear October morning, landing in Beirut as the afternoon light turned the city’s limestone façades a deep, burnished gold. Our friends were waiting for us. The Captain — as we have always called him, out of both affection and the sheer fitness of the title — had recently retired after a distinguished career flying for one of the region’s great airlines. He and his wife Sarah have been part of our lives for longer than either of us can properly account for; the kind of friends with whom conversation picks up mid-sentence, regardless of how many months have passed. They had taken it upon themselves to show us their Beirut, and their Beirut, we quickly discovered, was rather different from the one in the guidebooks.
“Lebanon had long existed in our imagination as a kind of culinary mythology — cedar-scented mountains, mezze that arrived in waves, and a people who seemed constitutionally incapable of setting a bad table.”
CERU FOUNDERS — BEIRUT, 2019
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DAY ONE
The Language of the Kitchen — Tawlet, Central Beirut
Our first full day had been arranged months in advance, in careful collaboration with the team at Tawlet — a remarkable restaurant in the heart of Beirut that operates on a quietly radical premise: that the true custodians of Lebanese cuisine are the women who cook it in their mountain villages, and that the best thing a restaurant can do is give them a stage. On this particular morning, it was our turn to take that stage alongside them.
The kitchen was already alive when we arrived. A group of women from the Lebanese mountains — some of whom had been making the same dishes, by hand, for fifty years — were already at work, and the warmth coming off the stoves was matched only by the warmth of their welcome. What followed was one of the most instructive days any of our chefs could recall. We brought our techniques — the precision, the modern plating, the methods we have refined over years at CERU. They brought something we could not have learned from any kitchen in London: an absolute, unhurried authority over flavour. No measuring cups. No timers. Just memory, instinct, and an intimate knowledge of what each ingredient needs.
The customers who came through that day experienced both approaches side by side — the traditional and the contemporary, the inherited and the interpreted — and what struck us was not any sense of competition between the two, but the ease with which they coexisted. The feedback we received was generous beyond what we deserved. But more than the compliments, we left with something harder to name: a recalibration of what it means to cook with genuine respect for a culture that is not your own.
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DAY TWO
The Market at Dawn — Beirut’s Organic Souk
We had been warned that the organic market in central Beirut was worth an early start. We were not warned quite how much it would move us. Arriving as the stalls were being set up, we found ourselves walking through a gathering of Syrian refugees who had turned the business of selling produce into something close to an art form. Their displays were meticulous — stacks of dried spice arranged by shade and scent, bunches of herbs so fresh they still carried the cold of the night, jars of preserves that caught the early sun like stained glass.
We spoke with many of them that morning, and what came through — past the obvious hardships, past the uncertainty of displacement — was an extraordinary pride in what they were making and how they were presenting it. These were people who cooked as an act of identity, who understood, perhaps better than most, that food is one of the most portable and durable expressions of who you are. The quality of ingredients was exceptional. The spice blends in particular stopped our chefs in their tracks — complex, layered, nothing like what is typically available to us in London. Several found their way back to CERU, in one form or another.
“These were people who cooked as an act of identity — who understood that food is one of the most portable and durable expressions of who you are.”
CERU — BEIRUT MARKET, 2019
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DAY THREE
The Other Side — Chez Fouad, By the Sea
The Captain, true to form, had kept the best for last. On our third morning he appeared at breakfast with the air of someone who has been sitting on a secret and can no longer contain it. He had arranged a boat. We were going, he said simply, to eat lunch at a place that did not take bookings and could only be reached from the water.
Chez Fouad sits on a narrow ledge of rock on the far side of Beirut’s coastline — a small, unassuming restaurant that has been feeding fishermen, sailors, and the occasional fortunate visitor for longer than anyone seems able to say. We arrived by sea, stepping off the boat onto sun-bleached stone, and were greeted with the kind of unhurried hospitality that makes you feel simultaneously that you have been expected and that time, for the next few hours at least, has ceased to apply.
Our chefs, rising to the occasion with characteristic enthusiasm, set about cooking for the assembled locals — a meal that drew as much from what we had learned at Tawlet two days earlier as from our own repertoire at CERU. The response from the people around that table was once again more generous than we had any right to expect. But what mattered most was not the reception. It was the setting: the sound of the water, the smell of charcoal and sea salt, the way the afternoon light fell across plates of food that had been cooked with genuine care, in a place of genuine beauty.
It is that quality — that convergence of place, people, and the simplest possible pleasures of the table — that we have tried, in our own way, to carry back to CERU. Lebanon, in three days, had given us more than we could properly articulate at the time. Some of it we have since managed to translate onto a plate. The rest lives somewhere less tangible: in the way we think about sourcing, about hospitality, about what a restaurant actually owes the people who walk through its door.
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We are writing this as the first in what we intend to be an ongoing series — stories from the journeys that have shaped how we cook, and why. There is more to tell from Lebanon, and we will tell it. In the meantime, if you would like to taste a little of what we brought home, we would be very glad to have you at the table.
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