Lebanese Roulette: A Painful Culinary Experience

Come one, come all, come and play Lebanese Roulette, eat out, buy locally made produce, jump in at the deep end with Kebbe Nayeh and eat a salad with unwashed veggies, chances are your bowels will get a new unwanted resident that will keep you up nights. For the price of a cheap hooker, get a not so cheap meal, it’ll give you fee-ver! Personally I prefer the hooker; at least with a hooker you are the one doing the screwing instead of being the one at the receiving end.

Many eateries about town (i.e. Beirut and that ugly urban sprawl that surrounds it) have chosen not to raise their prices too high; instead they have lowered the quality of their ingredients and their staff. Did they really think people could not tell the difference? Some even reduced the size of their portions. Pathetic!

Most eateries continue to display a total lack of imagination when it comes to the variety on offer. I rarely walk into a restaurant and go “wow, this is really good”. I miss that, I miss taking my taste buds on a culinary journey, a tour of pleasing oral sensations, instead every bite I take I risk falling off a culinary cliff, thus ending my journey before it even starts!

I have never returned as many dishes at restaurants as I have in Lebanon and its heart breaking because the Lebanese can be better than this, we are better than this, we are the original culinary snobs. Sadly, when most Lebanese open a restaurant they run the business like a cut-price cock-up-artist would, penny pinching where they should spare no expense, hiring cheap rather than choosing the best and most qualified people for the job.

Human ignorance plays a big role in food poisoning. Hiring cheap labor may look good on your balance sheet, but guess what, poisoning your guests is not good business. People can eat well at home, they can grow their own produce too, but when they go out for a meal they expect and deserve something extraordinary.

I am not exaggerating; this is a perennial problem that has progressively gotten worse and worse and the agro food industry in Lebanon is no better. Except for a handful of manufacturers who apply HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) standards in their manufacturing process, most manufacturers still follow antiquated production methods and have failed to penetrate the export market beyond the Arab region.

It’s not unusual to find foreign bodies inside sealed food containers, or so I have heard, it’s also rare to find the Lebanese complain much if at all to the proper authorities. Some may have doubts their complaint would lead to sanctions imposed on offending shops and eateries. I can certainly understand that attitude, being Lebanese it is common to think that an offender can wiggle out of a difficult situation with the law by greasing a few palms. Sadly, in some cases it’s true.

In conclusion, the best place to eat is at home.

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