Another table

Now that my 'getting paid to eat out' mission is complete, I sadly have to pay for the food I consume - except when juggling cousin comes to visit from Germany and tall uncle takes us out for lunch! Yes, it's another food-obsessed blog post!

Tall Uncle had recently heard about the restaurant spin-off to Souk el Tayeb (the organic market I still have to visit) called Tawlet Souk el Tayeb in Mar Mikhael, and proposed we try it out today. 'It's Lebanese food, though,' he said, asking whether we'd prefer a burger joint. Perhaps he hasn't yet noticed my love of Lebanese food over any other culinary masterpiece you could lay on my plate - even if it happened to be a Mochachos burger!

The thing I find disapponting at most traditional Lebanese restaurants is that they always have the same thing on the menu - start off with mezzas (hot and cold), move onto meat scewers, and end off with fruit. You never see the things that Mom makes at home. That's why I loved today's lunch. The idea behind Tawlet(meaning tables) is that everyday there's a different cook from a different part of Lebanon preparing the lunch - traditional dishes from their part of the country. You can either choose to enjoy the buffet for $25 or have the dish of the day for $10. Today, this happened to be one of my favourite Lebanese dishes, shish barak, prepared by a lady called Josephine from the north. The $10 also gets you water and a green salad. We took the shish barak, something like meat dumplings (sombreros) cooked in laban flavoured with mint and garlic. It was so obviously healthy that I immediately felt a surge of energy! Even the rice was of the body-benefiting variety.

What added to this experience was the setting. It's a vibey place in a cul de sac, and is filled with a lot of Achrafieh tantes and many foreigners, and the long table in the middle of one of the two interleading rooms means that all of these strangers could actually eat together (but they didn't today!).

They give cooking courses too, so guess what I'm looking into!