Much has been written about the new breed of Lebanese entrepreneur, mainly designers and artists, who have helped to sell Lebanon to the world. Their talent for making small and beautiful accessories and creating avant-garde art has added a new layer of desirability to all that is Levantine, especially for those who already can't get enough of the mother-of-pearl Damascene chests and occasional tables that grace the galleries of Chelsea and Belgravia.
Kamal Mouzawak is neither a designer nor an artist, yet no self-respecting feature writer tasked with capturing the new energy of Beirut passes through town without paying homage to the man who has become the high priest of healthy eating and the creator of Souk el Tayeb, the gastro-movement he founded in 2004 that champions organic food produced by the country's small farmers, while promoting a greener, cleaner Lebanon.
We are sitting in Tawlet, the restaurant that was born out of the Souk el Tayeb phenomenon. The menu, which changes every day, is a hugely popular self-service buffet of Lebanese, home-cooked, food from different parts of the country. The recipes are those of local chefs, mostly ordinary housewives, but there is often the odd foreign guest cook-in-residence such as Koral Elci and Pongo Mania, aka Kitchen Guerilla, from Germany as well as a team from Japan. You get the picture.
Not surprisingly, Tawlet's minimalist decor, with its 6-metre ceilings, whitewashed walls and stripped wooden tables, screams an urban cool that would hold its own in any major capital. Mouzawak is also not your typical eco-foodie-warrior. A cross between a Parisian dandy and Errol Flynn, he has successfully wooed the capital's brightest and edgiest talent. Tawlet has become, if you want, a canteen for creative Lebanon.
But there is steel to Mouzawak's aesthetic. "I want to harness the world of environmental and social responsibility to the business world's income generation, management and organisational skills," he says.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that Mouzawak is peddling just another version of corporate social responsibility. "Don't compare what I do to mainstream CSR [corporate social responsibility]," he says. "In most cases, this is simply buying a conscience."
That said, he is also equally dismissive of what he calls the non-governmental organisation begging-bowl approach. "That just doesn't work either because, nine times out of 10, when the money goes, the project is finished. We need to ensure sustainability through profitability."
Mouzawak's is a holistic approach. He says that if, on one level, sustainability can be defined as conserving an ecological balance by protecting natural resources, why not offer the same protection to the local producers? This would involve working on a model to create economic sustainability and provide sound and responsible income-generating activities.
Similarly, he argues that we must not only see profitability as simply about a fat bottom line. He believes we need to redefine profitability to encompass social and environmental responsibility, while at the same time improving income, exposure and working conditions.
"The wolf," Mouzawak's word for the business community, "needs to get a conscience and the emotional need to get real," he says. He calls it doing "well" and "good", and says Souk el Tayeb is the embodiment of this ethos.
On Saturdays at the weekly Beirut farmers' market, Mouzawak does this by bringing together consumers who value traditional, high-quality, natural products made by producers who can now get a fair price for their goods.
In 2008, Mouzawak was joined by his current business partner, Christine Codsi. "It was then that we evolved from the personal to institutional," he says. Souk el Tayeb is now a vibrant organisation, working nationally and internationally with similar groups. It spreads the gospel to schools and universities, including Executive MBA students, and promotes green living via theEl Tayeb Press and El Tayeb Newsletter.
This is all very good, you might think, and indeed readers living in Europe or the US may wonder why this type of story even merits column inches at a time when recycling, healthy eating and charting our carbon footprint are lifestyle non-negotiables.
Not so in Lebanon, where the ministry of tourism trumpets the country's natural beauty, but where in reality much of the mountains have become eaten up by concrete, and the hills and rivers infested with garbage. It is a social erosion that has resulted in the gradual depletion of many rural communities as more and more generations head for the cities or go abroad to find work. Lebanon's rural soul is being eaten away.
And so one man is trying to stop the rot and make a living at the same time. I put it to Mouzawak that he is a smaller incarnation of the new breed of modern entrepreneur, such as the founders of Google, who have declared simply that having made a bundle, they too now want to do good things. "Yes, but these guys have already made a trillion," he argues. "If we all waited till we became billionaires, then only a handful of people would be doing good. We have to start now. It must be part of our life." Indeed.
Michael Karam is a publishing and communication consultant based in Beirut
