The Table
We have watched Beirut take blow after blow, and we have watched it cook through every one. This year the cooking was counted. When the Middle East and North Africa's 50 Best Restaurants list was read out on the fourth of February, three Lebanese rooms stood on it, and the highest of them sat at number five.
That room is Beihouse, in Gemmayzeh, and it took the Highest New Entry award on its first appearance. The setting is three restored villas knit around a courtyard, the kind of address that in another decade might have been lost to a developer or a blast radius. Tarek Alameddine cooks Lebanese staples and then argues with them, working through fermentation and preservation until a familiar dish arrives slightly turned. The curators called the place a microcosm of Beirut. We would not improve on that.
A city that has been written off this often does not rebuild its kitchens to be ignored.
Em Sherif came in at thirteen, and it is the other pole of the same idea. Where Beihouse experiments, Em Sherif holds the line: home cooking served with the ceremony of a state dinner, the kibbeh nayyeh and the mouhallabiyeh arriving exactly as a grandmother would defend them. It has since opened a quieter outpost inside the Sursock Museum, a terrace above the garden, which tells you something about where the city wants to be seen eating.
Lower down, at thirty-nine, sits Buco, Alameddine again, this time at ease: burgers, cocktails, a gastro-bar that opened in late 2023 and never pretended to be anything grander. We mention it because the spread matters. A scene with one celebrated table is a fluke. A scene with three, running from avant-garde to comfort food, is a recovery.
None of this happened in calm conditions. The restaurateurs behind these rooms are, for the most part, well travelled and recently returned, bringing back technique without leaving the terroir, the wild herbs and mountain cheeses and preserves that were always the point. The result reads less like reinvention than like insistence.
We have eaten the mezze that this country sends out as a matter of course, the dozen small plates that arrive before anyone has ordered, and we have always understood it as a kind of argument: that hospitality is not optional here, that the table is where Beirut keeps its nerve. The 50 Best judges have now said so in a language the rest of the region reads. It is good to have it on the record. It is better to have a reservation.
