Beirut has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times — the Phoenician city, the Roman Berytus with its famous law school, the Crusader city, the Ottoman city, the French Mandate city, the Paris of the Middle East that lasted until 1975, the fifteen-year civil war that ended in 1990, the 2006 conflict, the catastrophic port explosion of August 2020 that killed more than 200 people and damaged or destroyed much of the city’s eastern districts — that the question of which version of Beirut you are visiting is never entirely straightforward. The city that exists now is the latest iteration of a place that has been reinventing itself on the eastern Mediterranean coast for three thousand years, and it carries all of those reinventions simultaneously: Roman columns propped against Ottoman walls, French Mandate apartment buildings bullet-scarred from the civil war standing next to glass towers built in the 2000s boom, the reconstructed Beirut Central District (the Solidère development that rebuilt the downtown after the civil war, controversial in its method and results but visually striking) existing alongside the uncleared ruins of buildings that nobody has had the money or the political will to address since 2020. Beirut is the most complicated city in the Arab world and the most alive, and the relationship between those two facts is not coincidental. The vitality of Beirut — the food, the nightlife, the intellectual and artistic culture, the specific warmth of Lebanese hospitality — is not in spite of the difficulty of being here. It is, in some ways that are difficult to articulate and impossible to miss, because of it. People who have been through what Beirut has been through and keep building restaurants and painting murals and dancing until dawn are communicating something important about the human capacity for existence that the more comfortable cities of the world do not have the occasion to demonstrate.

Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael: Where the City Lives

Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael — the two adjacent neighbourhoods on the slope running down from Achrafieh toward the port — are the neighbourhoods where Beirut’s character is most concentrated and most accessible to the visitor. They are the neighbourhoods of the artists and the architects and the restaurant owners and the NGO workers and the journalists who have made Beirut their home or refused to leave it, the places where the bars open at 8pm and close when the last person leaves, where the street art covers the walls of buildings that are still being repaired from the 2020 port explosion that hit this area harder than almost any other. Walking Gemmayzeh’s main street (Armenia Street) in the evening — the outdoor tables of the restaurants and bars filling, the sound of different music from different establishments competing pleasantly, the smell of arak and garlic and grilled meat — is the most immediate experience of Beirut’s social vitality. The neighbourhood’s architecture is specifically Beiruti: the turn-of-the-century Lebanese townhouses with their triple-arched facades (the characteristic Beiruti window that appears in the heritage buildings throughout the city), their wrought-iron balconies, their layers of life visible through the open shutters — the buildings that survived the civil war and the port explosion and that the people of this neighbourhood are working, with varying degrees of external support, to preserve and repair. Mar Mikhael, adjacent and slightly scruffier, is where the more creative and less self-conscious bars and galleries and workshops have concentrated in the last decade — the neighbourhood that Beirut’s own creative class considers its own, and that rewards the visitor who walks its streets without a specific agenda and lets the neighbourhood’s character accumulate through the afternoon into the evening.

The Food: Why Beirut Produces the Best Lebanese Cooking in the World

Lebanese food outside Lebanon is good. Lebanese food in Beirut is the reference point by which everything else is measured, and the gap between the two is significant enough that eating well in Beirut constitutes a specific education in what the cuisine actually is. The mezze table — the progression of small dishes that precedes the main course and that in a proper Beiruti restaurant might run to twenty or thirty preparations — is where the education begins: the hummus made from dried chickpeas soaked overnight and blended warm with real tahini and good lemon, the mutabbal of charred eggplant with tahini and pomegranate seeds, the tabbouleh that is predominantly fresh parsley (not bulgur, which is a supporting player rather than a base) dressed with lemon and olive oil and a small amount of tomato, the kibbeh nayyeh (raw minced lamb with bulgur and spices, eaten with fresh mint and spring onions, ordered only where the provenance of the meat is beyond question). The restaurants of Gemmayzeh, of the Hamra district, of Badaro and Quarantina serve this mezze at a level of freshness and precision that the international Lebanese restaurant, working with imported ingredients and a diaspora clientele’s expectations, cannot always match. Beyond the mezze, the grilled meats of the Lebanese mountains — the shish taouk (marinated chicken, the marinade of yoghurt and garlic and lemon and spices tenderising the chicken over hours before the charcoal cooks it), the kafta (spiced minced lamb on flat skewers, simple and excellent) — and the fresh fish from the Mediterranean (the grilled sea bass and sea bream of the Corniche restaurants, eaten with garlic sauce and fresh bread) constitute a food culture that is, at its best, one of the most complete and most pleasurable in the Arab world. Arak — the anise-based spirit of the Levant, diluted with cold water that turns it milky white, drunk throughout the meal with mezze — is the drink that makes the Beiruti table what it is, and drinking it properly, slowly, over a two-hour lunch that runs into the afternoon, is one of the definitive experiences of the city.

The Corniche, the Mountains, and the Day That Completes the Picture

The Corniche is Beirut’s seafront promenade — a 4.8-kilometre walkway along the Mediterranean coast from Ain el-Mreisseh in the north to the Raouché rocks in the south, lined with palm trees and the plastic chairs of the seaside cafés and the fishing spots of the men who have been coming to the same sections of railing with the same lines for decades. Walking the Corniche is the most democratic activity in Beirut — it is used by every social class, every religion, every age group, every political opinion, at all hours of the day — and the Raouché Rocks at the south end (two massive limestone sea stacks rising from the Mediterranean, the symbol of Beirut recognisable from any image of the city) are the destination of the sunset walk that every resident of Beirut does and that every visitor should. The Pigeon Rocks, as they are also called, catch the last light of the Mediterranean afternoon in a specific way — the stone going orange-pink against the darkening sea — that is as close to a perfect ending to a Beirut day as the city offers. The Lebanon Mountains, visible from the Corniche on clear days, begin 30 kilometres east of the city and rise to over 3,000 metres, and the drive or bus journey from Beirut into the mountains — to the Cedars of God (the ancient cedar forest protected since the 12th century, now a UNESCO site, with trees over a thousand years old) or to the Qadisha Valley (the UNESCO-listed holy valley of the Maronite Christian monastic tradition, its cliffs carved with hermit caves and monasteries) — is the day trip that puts Beirut in its geographic context: a coastal city at the foot of a mountain range that has been shaping the culture and the cuisine and the character of Lebanon for as long as Lebanon has been a place.

Beirut does not ask for your sympathy. It is not a city in need of your compassion or your charity tourism or your Instagram caption about resilience. It is a city of extraordinary food and complicated history and a social energy that is, given everything it has been through, one of the most remarkable things about it. Go for the mezze and the arak and the sunset on the Corniche. Go for the art of Gemmayzeh and the architecture of the triple-arched houses. Go because the Lebanese are among the most hospitable people in the Arab world and Beirut is the place where that hospitality is most fully expressed. And understand, while you are there, that the city you are eating and drinking and walking through is being held together by the people who chose to stay, and that the restaurants open and the bars full and the music playing until 4am are not an absence of awareness of how difficult things are. They are the response to it. That is what Beirut is.