Friday 21 March
Where do you take thirty people
who've just spent the day discussing Phoenician child sacrifice? To a Lebanese restaurant, of course. Jo Quinn's choice was the local classic, Al-Shami,
and she kindly took us along.
Once all the participants had been
toasted with Lebanese red and white wines, we started on a plate of uncut salad
- really. It's a whole romaine lettuce,
whole tomato, whole green pepper, and some olives and radishes, just on a plate. Luckily they had cut up the carrots and
pickled red cabbage, as we couldn't have dealt with that.
Then mezes started coming out, more than we could keep track of; the rather heated photo shows the scrum to grab them. There was hummus, of course, both normal and
Beirut style, with cumin; felafel; tabbouleh; and fattoush. Then there were the more exotic loubieh bzeit (green beans with tomato
and onion), mohammarah bil-jawz
(crushed nuts in red pepper sauce); various pastries and dumplings, including fatayer sebanikh (filled with spinach
and pine nuts), sanbousek biljibneh
(with feta), and sanbousek bil-lahme
(lamb); maqaniq and sujuq, two kinds of sausages; grilled
chicken wings with garlic sauce; and fried cauliflower.
Dinner ended with coffee, mint
tea, and mints, which was just fine considering all we'd eaten; no need for
baby - lamb! - in a pot, Carthaginian style.
Thanks for counting us in, Jo, and good wishes to all the Topheteers!
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