by Wendell Steavenson- The guardian 

Kamal Mouzawak grew up in Jeita, a small town in the mountains north of Beirut, during the Lebanese civil war. One of his earliest memories was when his mother was out of the kitchen and he decided to make a cake. He thought to himself: ‘What is a cake?’ He stirred a slurry of flour, sugar and eggs in an empty sardine tin because he could not find a cake pan and cooked it on top of the stove. “It was a burnt omelette!” he laughed, remembering the experiment over lunch this spring in Beirut. “But what still amazes me is the metamorphosis of ingredients.” Over the last decade, Mouzawak has created a recipe for transforming people’s lives through food. He now presides over a network of markets, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts and community outreach programmes in Lebanon.

Some projects are non-profit, others for-profit, and through them Mouzawak has developed a model of social entrepreneurship that is as much about empowering people as selling products. His brings together farmers, chefs, NGOs, designers and artisans, connecting people to politicians and business to ethics. One morning, in his main restaurant in Beirut, I watched him conduct three business meetings simultaneously, moving from table to table, discussing photographs for a new cookbook, plans for a new restaurant and giving a quick briefing to a group of European journalists on a tour. His enterprise is called Souk el Tayeb. Souk is Arabic for market and tayeb is a useful word with several meanings, including good, kind, delicious. It signifies acceptance, acknowledgement and thank you all rolled into one. Souk el Tayeb began as a farmers’ market in 2004.

I lived in Beirut when the market first opened on a scratched patch of car park, one of the bald spots in a city destroyed by 15 years of civil war. It sold orange blossom honey from the citrus orchards in the south, thick dark pomegranate molasses made by a grandmother in a mountain village, jars of pickled radishes, cucumbers, peppers; feta cheese preserved in oil with thyme and chillies. The sambousek stuffed with ground lamb and spinach always sold out within the first hour. Fresh fruit from across Lebanon at the Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market in Beirut. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fresh fruit from across Lebanon at the Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market in Beirut. Photograph: Natalie Naccache for the Observer The market is still one of the great wonders of the Middle East. I walked along the rows of stalls one recent sunny spring Saturday morning, marvelling, wide-eyed and hungry.

 

Traditional artisans rubbed shoulders with housewife cooks, hipsters, activists and foodie entrepreneurs. A Druze sheikh from the Bekaa valley in a long grey robe and a white turban offered me a tray of his dried fruits – mulberries, cherries, raisins and walnuts dripped in grape resin. A Syrian refugee, a graduate of one of the cooking workshops that Souk el Tayeb organises in conjunction with different refugee groups, encouraged me to try several varieties of her kibbeh. A blond Englishman was selling sourdough loaves next to an Armenian grandmother with a big bowl of itch, a bulgur salad made with tomato and Aleppo red pepper paste. The Lebanese Institution for the Blind had wicker baskets and chairs made by their members that Mouzawak uses in all the Souk el Tayeb restaurants, three Palestinian ladies in black gowns with traditionally embroidered red cross-stitching smiled behind a table of date-filled butter cookies.

Mouzawak began Souk el Tayeb ostensibly to support farmers by giving their produce a market. But, he admits, the idea was “never about selling cucumbers or tomatoes. It was always about giving people who had been fighting each other some kind of common ground.” Advertisement Mouzawak grew up in a small town but he never liked the small-town mentality. “I refuse to be confined,” he told me over lunch one day in Paris, where he often visits his Lebanese partner, a fashion designer, who lives there. Mouzawak wore a silver T-shirt under a grey overcoat; his curly hair was carefully brilliantined into smooth waves. “I don’t want to be in a ghetto. Whether it’s a gay ghetto, or religious or political. I am a Christian but I never talk about my religion.

It’s not relevant.” In 1991, after the civil war had ended, Mouzawak was finishing his studies in graphic design at a local university. He headed straight for Beirut. There he got involved in a cultural centre, organising evenings of slideshows and readings and concerts. “People came from all over the city, artists, different people. Even though there were no roads because they were all broken. There had been no communication, people hated each other, six weeks before they had been killing each other. They came together because there was a common project and a date and a time.” It was a template that Mouzawak would take with him, honing its articulation, through different careers and projects. Travel writing led to a guide book to Lebanon. In Italy, he door-stepped the Slow Food Movement, eventually becoming a board member. There was never a plan, one thing simply led to another, an evolution. The success of the farmers’ market was partly in bringing the rural into the city. Then he encouraged Beirutis back to the countryside, organising festivals in villages – the cherry festival, the olive oil festival, the prune festival – to celebrate local ingredients. Doing this, he met women from all over the country who came to cook big lunches for the events. It seemed natural to open a restaurant where these home cooks could showcase their regional dishes that had been passed down from grandmothers. Naseem Abou Mansour, the son of a Druze sheikh, sells pomegranates at the Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market in Beirut.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Naseem Abou Mansour, the son of a Druze sheikh, sells pomegranates at the Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market in Beirut. Photograph: Natalie Naccache for the Observer Tawlet, which means “table”, opened in 2009. The restaurant is hidden at the end of a cul de sac that backs up against disused railway tracks in the hip neighbourhood of Mar Mikhaël with its ice-cream coloured façades that house bars and restaurants. A carob tree casts dappled shade over a small terrace. Inside is a tall vaulted space, clean and comfortably chic; a long communal table, shelves of cookbooks and hand-blown glassware, one wall is filled with paintings and prints and watercolours of different green leaves. Each lunchtime a different women from a different region of Lebanon cooks their own dishes for a colourful buffet. One day I ate kibbeh nayyeh, raw goat pounded with bulgur, made by Maria Doueihy who comes from Zgharta in the north. She showed me how to roll it in a piece of thin bread with a mint leaf and olive oil. Another day, Oum Ali from Majdel Zoun in the south served freekeh, smoked cracked green wheat, cooked slowly with chicken, like a risotto. Tawlet has won fans and awards internationally, as much for its story as for its food.

In 2016, Mouzawak was given a prestigious Prince Claus award in the Netherlands, which honours people for pioneering work in the fields of culture and development. Advertisement Nada Saber, a hale and ruddy grandmother from the West Bekaa, cooks at the restaurant once a month and also has a stall at the market selling her pickles and preserves. Her involvement with Souk el Tayeb has given her family a steady income, but more importantly a sense of pride. Saber told me that when Mouzawak first asked her to cook for the restaurant she was nervous. “But when people started saying, ‘This is so good,’ or ‘This reminds me of how my mother used to cook,’ I became proud. All my tiredness and my anxiety disappeared. If Kamal hadn’t pushed me, I never would have thought of cooking in a restaurant.” Mouzawak has taken groups of his home cooks all over the world. They have cooked for René Redzepi at his food symposium MAD, in Copenhagen, at events in Vienna, Florence, Paris, China and India. Their food is an expression of their own identity as much as it represents a wider cultural heritage. “Change-making,” Mouzawak calls it, “for the women and for their families. The food is not important. The proof of the change is in a simple bite of tabbouleh, but the tabbouleh is just the proof of the possible. Inspiration is a word that we use a lot.”

 For several years Mouzawak and his team have expanded the reach of classes they run (funded by the UNHCR and NGOs) that teach women food hygiene, menu design and marketing, so they include groups of Palestinian and Syrian refugees. When I visited a class in the northern Lebanese coastal town of Tripoli, it was made up of women who had all lost family and homes in the Syrian civil war and the fighting between Alawite and Sunni militias in Tripoli in 2013. At first they had come to the class as enemies, widows from both sides. Slowly, over several weeks, the emotion and the stress subsided. Proof of change is in a bite of tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is proof of the possible I watched the women learn how to make fresh pasta and a genoise sponge. There was a lot of camaraderie, jostling, joshing and bustle. Two of the women were bareheaded, one wore a full-face veil. By the end of the class, I noticed, she had pushed it up over her forehead. Mouzawak was very happy when I told him: it was an illustration of how suspicion and division can dissolve almost naturally.

At Tawlet and at the market, the roster of cooks includes Sri Lankans from the army of maids who work for the Beiruti elite, third generation Armenians who fled to Lebanon from genocide in 1915, displaced Aleppans, and Palestinians from the refugee camps. Mouzawak has forged a vision that is unashamedly inclusive. This spring, Tawlet hosted its first soup kitchen in conjunction with several organisations who help poor families. For Mouzawak, it was not about feeding people, but about giving them a special night out. He was pleased that the invited families had dressed up for the occasion and enjoyed themselves, but he was even more thrilled that afterwards dozens of well-to-do Beirutis emailed him, wanting to volunteer their time for future evenings. “It’s about getting these silos to communicate,” he says.

One day, we drove down the coast to the southern city of Saida where Mouzawak was opening a new branch of Tawlet in partnership with the Hariri Foundation for Sustainable Human Development. Saida is a conservative Sunni city, poor, crowded with displaced Syrians and with an intimidating reputation. Recently, private and public funds have rehabilitated the ancient, mazy souk. The new restaurant is housed in an old stone mansion. Its terrace dining room has a wide blue view of a crusader castle and fishing boats in the harbour. Mouzawak talked to the chef and the women – graduates of one of Souk el Tayeb’s programmes — who will staff the kitchen, and ran through decor and logistics. Opening a Tawlet here, he acknowledged, was a risk. Would people come to a restaurant that didn’t serve alcohol, which is prohibited in Saida? Would locals be put off by the clean modern lines and the trendy Beiruti vibe of an open kitchen? Zeina Ibrahim, cook of the day at Tawlet restaurant in Beirut.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zeina Ibrahim, cook of the day at Tawlet restaurant in Beirut. Photograph: Natalie Naccache for the Observer Outside, Mouzawak walked me around the souk; we bought black maamoul cookies made with nigella seeds from a cross-eyed, white-haired old man with a little shop in an arched niche off a tiny lane. Mouzawak explained that these were eaten by Christians at Easter and Muslims at Eid Al-Adha. “You see! The kitchen has no religion.” Then we went to eat the excellent local foul – smashed chickpeas with tahini, garlic and sour orange – around the corner. “For me, the challenge is how to get people living in this area,” he said, his eye on the bigger picture. “It’s a regeneration project. I want the restaurant to be a case study, a pilot project, in how to transform an old city.” Advertisement Mouzawak explained that he planned to have guides in the restaurant to show people around the streets. “Beirutis are a bit scared of the Saida souk, its interior is rough and poor and bearded. They are afraid because the people of the souk made a ghetto for themselves in the same way that the people from the city make a ghetto for themselves. We are just trying to introduce them, to get them to know each other, and then they will see that there is no ‘other’.”

Souk el Tayeb’s message is beginning to be heard beyond Lebanon’s borders. In February, while we were having lunch in Paris, Emmanuel Macron, now France’s president, was in Beirut for a one-day visit and had taken his whole entourage for lunch at Tawlet. One of Mouzawak’s colleagues texted him a photo and he showed it to me. Macron stood with four women who were cooking that day, a Syrian refugee from Damascus, a Palestinian, a Druze and a Christian. The women were all beaming with joy and Macron was touching both hands to his chest, smiling back, as if to say, “Really, for me? Thank you!” “Look at these women,” said Mouzawak. “Their achievement, their pride. It’s very touching.” He had tears in his eyes, as if his whole life’s work had been distilled in this single image. “I’m sorry, give me a moment, I have to Instagram it.”