Michael Karam: Traditions live on at venerable Beirut restaurant

The menu has not changed; the prices are still shamefully affordable; the takeaway side of the business is reportedly flourishing, and the adoring postcards from all corners of the world keep landing on the doorstep.

In the late '90s, the offices of The Daily Star newspaper were located on the sixth floor of a concrete tower block in Gemayzeh, a lower middle-class Christian area on the eastern edge of downtown Beirut. The building sat uncomfortably against Gemayzeh's late-Ottoman charm, defined by low-rise buildings with tiny shops, which ran along Rue Gouraud, named after the one-armed French general who presided over the creation of the French Mandates in Syria and Lebanon.

Back then, there were no bars in Gemayzeh and the only restaurant was Le Chef, a simple family-run eaterie run by François Bassil, his two brothers, Abu Fares and Abou Elias, his son Charbel, his nieces who manned the till and a handful of young Syrian waiters.

The food was equally simple Lebanese home cooking. There was a set menu with daily specials. If memory serves Monday was hot fish; Tuesday coq au vin, Wednesday chicken curry; Thursday mloukhieh and Friday, of course, fish. Saturday was a roast beef with mashed potatoes. It was shut on Sundays.

I can say with some certainty that I ate there practically every weekday. As the paper's features editor, I would arrive at Marine Tower at 5am, step over the security guard who was fast asleep on the floor of the entrance, roll up my sleeves and have my pages sent to the subs by 11am. I would then slope off to Le Chef for either a plate of meat and eggs or a bowl of foul (sometimes both) with Gareth Smyth, the then Financial Times Beirut correspondent who lived above Le Chef and who calculated it was cheaper to eat there every day than do a weekly shop.

We built up a firm friendship with Charbel, who we decided was the finest maître d’ in Lebanon. With the benefit of a better education he could have done anything he wanted, but as it was he taught himself English and French and was a firm favourite among the tourists who had read about Le Chef in all the best guidebooks and wanted to dine among the pious residents of Gemayzeh, who would cross themselves before tucking in to François’s hot and filling fare.

They included the man who could eat a dozen eggs in one sitting; the Armenian with an unfeasibly big nose who we cruelly called the “Parrot” and the endless stream of foreign journalists and NGO workers who taught a sponge-like Charbel British and American jargon. Hence, the bill very soon became “the damage”, and the rain was suddenly filled with “cats and dogs”.

But in 2004, three years after the newly redeveloped Beirut Central District opened for business, Rue Gouraud was pollinated by the BCD pixie dust and exploded into life. The elderly shop owners were gradually bought out and the area very quickly became stuffed to the gills with bling-drenched bars and restaurants, one of which was, rather ominously, called Tabkha, or home cooking. It was Le Chef for the Beirut bourgeoisie. Was this the future?

And over the next seven years, Gemayzeh became the undisputed epicentre of Beirut nightlife. On a Saturday night Rue Gouraud, once dead to the world after 6pm, became bedlam, prompting the residents – new and old – to take to the streets in their pyjamas, clutching their pillows, in protest at the madness. Their lives, they said, had become a misery.

Quite what Charbel thought of all this was anyone’s guess, but he nonetheless adapted and evolved. He developed a new patter, greeting anyone who walked past with a loud and elongated “Welcome”; Le Chef opened in the evening and underwent something of a refurbishment, which in Le Chef speak meant a new lick of white paint.

Gemayzeh is now dead. In the finest of Beirut tradition, the bars and restaurants, including Tabkha, have moved on – either to Hamra in the west of the city or MarMikael farther down the road, but Le Chef and Charbel are still there and still pulling in the punters. Abou Fares and Abou Elias have sadly died and François is nearly blind, but the rest of the staff, including the ladies on the till and some of the Syrian waiters I remember from 1998, are still there. The menu hasn’t changed; the prices are still shamefully affordable; the takeaway side of the business is reportedly flourishing, and the adoring postcards from all corners of the world keep landing on the doorstep.

They really don’t make them like that any more.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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