Eventually I emerge on the southwestern side of the quiet residential area and reach the five-way intersection of Damascus Road, a wide avenue with an accurate name: the road does eventually lead to the Syrian capital. The intersection is flanked by parking lots and construction sites and has wide-open sightlines to the tall, bland condo buildings of southeast Beirut in the near distance, and to the crumbling-stone civil war ruins dotted among them. I find Sahyoun, actually two Sahyouns, which turn out to be side-by-side falafel stands owned by competing brothers who have both kept the same name; copyright laws are, one will quickly note in Beirut, very low on the list of enforcement priorities.
I order a falafel sandwich from the stand farther downhill, the one I’ve heard is better, and watch the cook take the hot falafel spheres off the revolving round fryer and wrap them in Arabic bread, topping them with dollops of tartar sauce, deep-red slices of tomato, and a sprig of mint. I take a bite: not bad, actually pretty good, fresh-tasting instead of too dry or too soggy, and not overly cluttered with ingredients. The mint leaves add an unexpected punch, brightening the creamy, fried sandwich filling. This is a much better falafel than I’ve had in recent memory, maybe anywhere. It even lives up to the hype. I won’t crave one of these every week, but I’ll be back.
Food pilgrimages, to me, aren’t only about the food, or the trip. It’s not just that I love to eat and to wander around. Even a relatively short, taxi-assisted trek to Sahyoun, and a winding stroll back, after having found the thing I was looking for—no matter whether I enjoyed the food itself or not—makes me feel recharged. Meandering through the city, taking in the sights and sounds, and reflecting on my day or my life or whatever other subject floats through, clears my head. It’s a mobile meditation, with an edible reward at the end. Reminds me of one afternoon in Manhattan, before I landed my first food-writing job at Time Out New York, when I’d read about a certain kind of Portuguese cheese bread in the newspaper and had walked from Houston Street forty blocks uptown to Hell’s Kitchen to look for the bakery that makes it. The roll itself wasn’t such a thrill, and the cheese was too bland, at least the way this bakery made it. But I loved the search, the ramble, the mission fulfilled.
Another balmy Beirut morning in mid-October, I walk downtown again, stopping this time at the Virgin Megastore, housed in an old brick theater with slim dark red windows, to buy a CD from a now-defunct Lebanese trip-hop band called Soap Kills; then I pop into the downtown branch of the classic Amal Bohsali pastry shop to buy a piece of knafeh. Knafeh is one of my favorite breakfast-dessert hybrids, a cakelike confection made with a crumbly dough called mafroukeh, topped with a melted, oozingly stretchy mild local cheese called akkawi, and generous drizzles of hot sugar syrup. Bohsali serves an exceptional knafeh, and although it makes for heavy eating at any time of day, it takes me straight back to childhood and back to family dinners in Houston, when my parents would pick up knafeh from a Lebanese pastry shop there, or order it by FedEx from an Arabic confectionery in Michigan, to reheat at home.
I stroll back to Hamra through the short hills above the Wadi Abu Jamil district, taking a path I haven’t gone on before. I navigate back to Hamra mostly on instinct, trying to sharpen a directional skill that’s always felt sorely lacking. I walk along a paved pathway above the construction sites of Wadi Abu Jamil, past parking lots, trees, and renovated old houses, and reach the foot of a concrete stairway that leads up to the edge of the neighborhood, from which I’ll cross an intersection and end up at the eastern edge of Hamra. Before I climb the concrete steps, I stop to look up at a butter-colored old townhouse with elaborately carved stone balconies and a lovely violet house next to it.
As I’m reaching the top of the stairs and about to cross over to Hamra, an armed guard stops me and asks where I’m going. Home, I say. He looks me up and down, waits two seconds, waves me by. One of the mansions owned by the family of former prime minister Hariri is nearby, so there are armed guards and chained-off sidewalks and tanks positioned on the street, as in so many other spots considered likely targets all over the city. Beirut still looks like a military zone in certain places, until you get used to it and almost stop noticing.
Despite the interruption, I’m finding this route through the hilly edge of downtown so pleasant today—it’s quiet and traffic free and cuts a straight line through to Hamra. As I walk, I try to picture how Beirut looked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was all rangy gardens and agricultural fields and stretches of grass sprinkled with yellow houmayda wild-flowers, with red-roofed stone houses dotted across a wide-open landscape reaching down to the Mediterranean. As a young girl, my mother would walk back and forth from Hamra to the Ahliah school in Wadi Abu Jamil every day, taking roughly the same path as I’ve taken today, but with no construction sites to snake through, no buildings blocking the view clear across town and down to the sea.
I’m conscious, as I take these long walks now, that my stride is firmer, more confident than it was in those early weeks in August and September. With my feet, I’m already starting to feel like I own the city again, at least in some small way. I’m memorizing it physically, learning the routes. Route/routine. It hits me that this is what a routine is—a kind of route. I need routines to feel at home. More and more they’re taking shape, my routines, my routes.
I was thinking as I walked today about what a city can say to you if you listen. New York, to me, has always seemed to say: Here you are. Stay. This is what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it? Beirut, as far as I can tell now, is saying something like You can stay if you want, if you’re up to it. But it’s not going to be easy. Not in the least.
Obviously what a city “says” to anyone is a projection. The question is, can that message be ignored, overruled? Time can potentially override it, and so can new friends and routines, but might the city still say what it always said, even if it says it in a slightly lower voice as the years go by? Can you fall in love with someone whom you knew early on you weren’t in love with? Can you fall back in love with someone or something you once loved, after years of mystery and distance?
As I sip my coffee one morning, I scan through cultural listings on a local website and read about an event that night to celebrate the launch of a book called At the Edge of the City. It’s a compilation of essays about the Horsh al-Sanawbar, an eighty-acre park in southeastern Beirut that’s mostly closed to the public. The reasons it’s closed are nebulous, and apparently some of the contributors to the book have tried to get official answers out of the government but gotten nowhere. The theory seems to be that the authorities are trying to keep the park, the 80 percent of it that’s officially closed, pristine, so city elites who have a government wasta—a personal connection—can use it privately, without having to commune with the riff-raff. I go to the event that night, just a few blocks from my apartment, and walk in as the book’s editor, Fadi Shayya, is talking about the history of the park and showing a nineteenth-century postcard of the Horsh as a snowy pine forest, with men riding through it on donkeys. The park had been created in the seventeenth century by the Druze ruler of Lebanon under the Ottoman Empire, Fakhreddine Maan, to protect Beirut from the southern winds. In the centuries since then, it’s been alternately protected, neglected, and bombed, most heavily during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For the past decade, the Île de France municipality has been contracted to help maintain the park.
During the Q&A session after the presentation, I strike up a conversation with a friendly-looking woman named Joumana, one of the contributors to the book, who made some of the more fascinating comments about the park’s history. She also looks slightly familiar. We quickly find out that, in typical Lebanese style, we know people in common: she’s friends with the son of some old classmates of my parents, and it turns out Joumana and I met briefly at his wedding reception a few summers ago. Since then she’s grown out her hair, but her delicate features and warm smile instantly come back to me. Joumana lives in Dubai now but
is here visiting for a week, and she invites me to a related event the next night at a place called Sanayeh House, in a district not far from Hamra and adjacent to a public park called Sanayeh.
The next evening I spend the half hour before the event starts walking around that neighborhood, past rows of glass-balconied condo buildings, searching for the address Joumana gave me and peering at the map I printed out. I spot another woman who seems lost, too. She looks about my age and is wearing stylish low-slung pants and a slim-fitting purple sweater that sets off her shoulder-length chocolate hair, and she seems approachable despite her striking looks. We make eye contact, she introduces herself as Mirna, and we quickly learn we’re searching for the same place and that Joumana invited her, too. We amble around together, lost.
We ask for directions several times and keep getting pointed to Zico House, a well-known events venue nearby. We eventually walk in, thinking Sanayeh House must be a nickname for Zico House, and go up the stairs, following the light and noise to a room where the door is cracked open. This has to be it. We push open the door and walk in. A group of people who seem to be in their twenties and thirties are talking animatedly, as someone with long black hair and a wool hat writes on the chalkboard. Sounds like a vigorous discussion, and Mirna and I stand briefly, waiting for an opening in the chatter so we can make sure we’re in the right place and take our seats.
I silently clear my throat, then hear myself saying “Hi …”
Suddenly everyone in the room is quiet, staring at us. I eke out my question.
“No, this isn’t Sanayeh House,” a voice from the back of the room chimes in. More silence. No one else speaks up. I’m mortified that we’ve barged in and interrupted, although I’m not sure what we’ve just walked into.
We apologize clumsily and hurry out. Mirna tells me, when we reach the bottom of the stairs, that we must have crashed a transsexuals meeting. I later learn that Zico House, among its many functions, is a meeting place for a Lebanese organization that lobbies for gay, lesbian, and transsexual rights. No wonder people in the room looked anxious when they saw two unknowns standing in the doorway watching. Lebanon is less aggressive about persecuting gay and transgendered people, at least vis-à-vis other countries in the Middle East (which isn’t saying much, I realize), but two strangers barging into your meeting is understandable cause for worry here.
By now the Sanayeh House event, wherever that is, must have started. Mirna and I both call Joumana’s cell but don’t reach her. We keep on looking, and a half hour later we give up. But we’ve hit it off nicely, Mirna and I, in our clueless wanderings. I’ve learned that she grew up here and has just moved back from Dubai for an urban-planning job. We’re new Beirutis and old Beirutis, the two of us. We exchange numbers.
I e-mail Joumana the next day to apologize for getting lost and not showing up at her event. Later in the week, she invites me to lunch with Mirna and another friend of theirs. The group of them are easy to be around, and refreshingly, nothing feels forced about our conversation, even though I’m the newcomer to this crowd. The chitchat roams from Beirut-versus-Dubai (a favorite topic around here these days, with so many Lebanese emigrating to Dubai for work), to relationships, and to what we love and hate about this city.
It’s a stroke of luck to have stumbled into Mirna and Joumana—hanging out with them feels oddly effortless. Joumana seems to have a sharp, creative mind but also a genuineness, a mellow vibe, an appealing expression. It reminds me a little of what first drew me to my New York friend Claire, a certain lighthearted openness and a quick intelligence coming through all at once in her eyes. Though Joumana is returning to Dubai soon and comes to Beirut only occasionally, perhaps Mirna and I will get together again. I still don’t know many people my age in Beirut and could use a few more friends.
I’m about to have more company soon, too. My parents will land in Beirut in late October for their annual Lebanon homecoming trip, and I’ll spend a few days with them here before I head to New York. I want to stock the fridge before they arrive. At the Co-op, a compact two-story supermarket a few blocks from the apartment, where my mother used to shop when we lived here, I pick up a few tubs of labneh and of tangy Lebanese yogurt, and some bags of Arabic bread, and a few kilos of the vegetables and greens my parents like having around: the finger-sized local cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, and fresh zaatar leaves, a local variety of thyme, to fold up with bread, labneh, and olive oil at breakfast. I grab some carrots to slice into sticks and soak in water flavored with lemon juice and salt—a popular Beirut snack. I also can’t resist buying a tube of Choco Prince cookies and a box of Picon cheese, for old times’ sake. Choco Prince billboards and TV ads were ubiquitous when I was growing up here, and Picon commercials had a jingle that my school friends and I had endless fun with:
Jibnit Picon, jibne khira’iye. Min teez al’ kalb …
Meaning: “Picon cheese, a shitty cheese, from a dog’s ass …”
The real words were something like “Jibnit Picon, a French cheese, from cow’s milk,” but the dirty version rhymed nicely in Arabic. When I get home from the store, I open a wedge of Picon and wrap it in a piece of Arabic bread. I haven’t eaten it in so many years, and I’m curious if it will be remotely edible now. Hmm, not too bad: just salty creaminess, with a sticky, almost plasticky texture. It’s processed cheese and tastes like it, but it’s not horribly objectionable, I have to admit. The Choco Prince is sheer pleasure, just as I remember it. Buttery biscuits sandwiching a chocolate cream filling. All processed, nothing terribly original going on. But a very basic kind of comfort and joy. Two major culinary fixtures of my childhood, and here they still are.
The days before my parents arrive quickly fill up. I stop by a restaurant called Tawlet, specializing in Lebanese regional dishes, and catch up over lunch with its owner, Kamal Mouzawak. He opened Tawlet a few years ago after creating the Souk el Tayeb, billed as the first farmer’s market in Beirut, although in some ways it’s a revival of the prewar produce souks around downtown. I’d met Kamal in New York at a food event a couple of years ago, and I’d run into him here in Beirut while shopping at Souk el Tayeb a few weeks ago. The market is downtown on Saturday mornings, and I’ve tended to sleep through it most weekends, but when I’ve motivated myself to get up in time, I’ve always been glad I did. It’s one of the most reliable places to find high-quality, organically grown fruits and vegetables—plus cheeses, honey, pastries, and cooked dishes made by the farmers’ families.
While Kamal greets some Tawlet regulars, I flip through this week’s issue of Time Out Beirut as I devour a plate of kibbeh nayyeh, the Lebanese lamb tartare, wrapping it up in fingerfuls of pita with a slice of white onion, a pinch of salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. Soon Kamal comes back to the table and tells me he wants to introduce me to another New York expat now living in Beirut. She and I look at each other for a long second, then both smile. It’s a journalist named Kaelen, who had worked at The Village Voice at the same time I did, more than a decade ago. We never knew each other very well, but I’d heard she’d moved to Beirut about ten years ago to cover the art scene and ended up staying and marrying a Lebanese. She’s on that list of people I’ve been meaning to contact in Beirut. I should’ve guessed, after all the other coincidental run-ins I’ve had so far, that I’d bump in to her sooner or later. We catch up for a few minutes, then she has to start her interview with Kamal for a profile she’s doing for a magazine, but we vow to plan a proper drinks session.
An unexpected e-mail arrives that night. An acquaintance from a recent freelance project in New York tells me two of her friends from the States are visiting Beirut this week, on a whim, while en route to a Dubai fashion event, and asks me if I’d mind showing them around a little. I make plans to meet them the next night: Alison, a magazine editor in New York, and her friend Stacy, a TV writer in L.A. We meet for a drink at the glass-enclosed rooftop bar of the new Le Gray hotel downtown, where they’re staying, then head to the dinner I’ve booke
d for us at Abdel Wahab, a Lebanese restaurant I like in Achrafieh.
It’s a hot night—the temperatures still haven’t dropped—so instead of walking, we take a taxi across the flat, open middle of downtown. We cross Martyrs’ Square, with its bullet-ridden metal statue of gun-toting Lebanese revolutionaries who were hanged by the Ottomans in World War I, and drive past the luxurious new brick mansions of the Saifi Village neighborhood on the eastern edge of downtown. Our taxi then goes up a slow-sloping hill into Achrafieh. We walk into the restaurant, my companions admiring the ornate green and gold door that leads in and up to the leafy rooftop terrace. Over plates of eggplant fatteh, and shish taouk dipped into the creamy garlic sauce known as toum, and fresh sumac-spiced fattoush salad, and glasses of arak, the local anise liqueur, we chatter about the New York media world, people we know in common, and their impressions of Beirut.
“Such a beautiful and fascinating little city. I can’t believe more Americans don’t come here. Is there much tourism going on these days? Do people still think it’s dangerous?”
“I guess so,” I reply. “A lot of tourists want to feel it’s a hundred percent safe before they visit. It’s the Middle East, though. There’s always something brewing. But I’ve been overhearing more American, European, African, and Asian tourists around Beirut lately. Not tons, but more than I’d noticed in the past.”
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