By Katherine Zoepf,  At Element, the young crowd sits in oversized red plush armchairs, dines on Thai beef carpaccio and dances under swirling confetti lights. At the wildly Crystal, where the specialty is champagne and visiting Saudis are said to gather, Porsches and Bentleys crowd the curbs outside. At M-Box, bar-top dancing is something of a competitive sport: Would-be customers stand in a steel shower-stall-like foyer to be carefully appraised for acceptability, and T-shirt wearers can forget about getting in.


Welcome to the rollicking Rue Monot, a hilly street lined with bars and boites, the heart of the new Beirut night life. (When a visitor telephoned to ask for one bar’s address, the manager answered impatiently: “It’s Monot, just Monot! No address — we’re famous! Everyone knows the place!”)

But as young men in black leather pants and young women in backless dresses bicker playfully and stroll from club to club, you can’t help noticing that the shiny bills advertising new music acts are plastered onto walls heavily pockmarked by bullets, and the swanky open-air bistros overlook piles of rubble.

As Beirut reclaims its old identity, emerging once again as the freewheeling nexus of Middle Eastern hospitality and French-inflected joie de vivre, it is rebuilding, perhaps defiantly, on its own ground zero, where thousands died fighting in the 15-year Lebanese civil war that began in 1975. The Rue Monot, where the partying is hardest, lies right along the infamous Green Line that once divided Christian East Beirut from the Muslim West.

The mood is giddy but overhung with a dark awareness. Observing the revelry on the Rue Monot, the visitor is never quite sure whether the dominant theme is reconciliation and renewal, or a kind of crazed, deliberate forgetfulness.

“We’re a Mediterranean people,” said Tommy Tabib, the manager at Pacifico, a large club and Cuban-Mexican restaurant on Rue Monot. “We like to dance and talk and be hospitable. But we were stuck in the bomb shelters for so many years. So now we go out every night.”

Dark humor

The Paris of the Middle East, the playground of the Levant — these old, these cheerful cliches are being tossed around again, this time by a new generation of Beirutis with a surprising lack of cynicism.

Yet in the Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian Beirut district through which the Rue Monot runs, the big clubs have an architectural grimness that suggests nothing of the old city of sunshine and cedar trees. They look like great, jagged, freestanding fortresses, all built from soaring slabs of gray concrete, arranged at odd angles to one another, and lighted to dramatic effect by fluorescent bulbs recessed in the ground.

A rich vein of dark humor runs through the revelry, perhaps reaching its apotheosis at 1975, a civil-war-themed bar that opened in September. Amid decorations consisting of mortar shells, anti-tank missiles and camouflage netting, customers puff on water pipes made of old ammunition cases, and a life-sized dummy dressed as a black-masked commando climbs up a section of netting near the front entrance. The back wall is decoratively marked by bullets even though buildings streaked by actual bullet holes stand just a few blocks away.

Serious club kids often talk about the ecstasy of the dance floor, the way the barriers between people and communities are broken down, and the whole room begins moving as one. It can sometimes seem that every 22-year-old in Beirut wants to assure you that his best friends include Christians and Muslims, that when they go out there is no difference between them.

Hassan Mourad, a friendly, dark-eyed 24-year-old with a neatly trimmed goatee, said that though he and his friends, Christian and Muslim alike, head to the Rue Monot every Friday night, their elders still worry about the mixing of those communities.

“When I go out to Achrafieh, my aunts and uncles tell me that I’m going over to the other side,” Mourad said. “But for people my age, it’s not a problem anymore. We try not to think about those things.”

According to most accounts, the serious rebuilding of the Rue Monot began in 1997, when Pacifico opened. Elie Issa, a waiter there, gestured at the surrounding buildings and said that when Pacifico began welcoming its first customers, the buildings were all gutted and destroyed, and no one in Beirut came to the Rue Monot — a place of death and dark memories — if it could be avoided.

But Pacifico, he said, was immediately popular. It was followed swiftly by Hole in the Wall, which today is known as a hangout for beefy, rugby-shirted British expats, and a place called Mode (now Rai).

And as the evening crowds began to flow back to Monot, a string of clubs opened in their wake, each designed to provide an entire evening out, including food, drink and entertainment.

One-drink limit

But Issa warned a visitor not to be fooled by the general atmosphere of joyful excess on the Rue Monot.

“They look like they have money,” he said of the throng outside Lila Braun’s, a cocktail lounge across the street. “They know how to dress and how to act. But most of the people you see here will go out all night and only buy one beer. They don’t have any money. This country is full of disasters.”

Beirutis make that one beer last, Issa explained, because putting on their best clothes and going out with their friends is simply part of what it means to be Lebanese.

“It’s a tradition here, a prestige thing,” he said. “The economy here is so bad now that no one can give a thought to the future. So they enjoy today to the fullest. That is Beirut.”

This characteristically Lebanese take on the economy can be bewildering to outsiders, who see a Beirut where women carry French-label handbags, and downtown people-watching suggests a national devotion to fashion, regular gym visits and discreet plastic surgery.

But foreign visitors to Monot may be startled to notice that they are the only ones ordering hard liquor, that most bartenders don’t know how to make even fairly basic mixed drinks, and that everyone else is simply chatting and munching peanuts and sipping that single beer throughout the whole evening.

Oddly familiar as the partying may seem to those who remember the old days, today’s Beirut is a different kind of Paris of the Middle East.

At 1975, Rony Zerbe, a co-owner, said his gallows-themed bar has been popular because it sits well with a peculiarly Lebanese kind of nostalgia.

“Our customers sit together, all parties, all religions in the same room,” Zerbe said. “We play Fayrouz, and all the old Arabic songs, and we make them happy.”

Many Lebanese who were small children during the war remember it almost fondly, he explained. Even stints in the bomb shelters can be recalled as a time of familial warmth and togetherness.

“The war is our history,” he said. “For most of our customers, the war was their childhood. We can’t change that.”