The nouveau Levant: Redefining cuisines and cultures from Montreal's Arab diaspora

The Arab diaspora experience comes down to one word: Ghorbeh. Its literal translation is “being in the West”, but it embodies the reality of being without your family and your community, and adjusting to what is around you. 

It also means you have to make do with finding the comforts of home in an unfamiliar setting, looking to people, communities, ingredients, and even restaurants to get that feeling. 

Having lived in Montreal for over fifteen years as a picky Palestinian/Lebanese immigrant, a big part of ghorbeh I’ve witnessed is fellow Levantine Arabs—Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian—opening food concepts that boast our cultural background. 

But what once started as a sprinkling of traditional places designed to give the rustic and simplified experience we have at home like Daou and La Sirène de La Mer has evolved into finer dining experiences like Hayat, Shay, and HENI, as well as modern cafes serving homey staples like saj and manakish. 

These places are more urban, and a little flashier than what we would get in our home countries. On Hayat’s menu, Manti dumplings (also known as shish barak to those of us who don’t have Armenian roots) are made with Impossible meat. You can get burrata alongside kibbeh nayyeh at Shay. 

As delicious as these places are, they also bring a nagging question: Are we reimagining our cuisine and culture to suit a Western palate?

In a time where our culture is so endangered due to appropriation, aren’t we afraid of shining a light on what we eat and how we drink at home by bringing it out to the public?

New twists on tradition

The founders of the upscale Little Burgundy restaurant HENI offered some insight. The ghorbeh experience is parlayed with an extensive selection of Lebanese wines and a menu of rustic dishes inspired by the SWANA kitchen.

HENI co-founder Soufian Mamlouk is also the brains behind Lulu Epicerie—the place producing what is considered by many members of the local Arab community as the city’s most perfect shawarma to date.

“I’m thankful for shawarma places like Amir and Boustan, because they introduced shawarma and hummus to Quebec,” Soufian says.

But these places also mirror the local palate, and result in Arab street food turned 'all-dressed' shawarmas and chicken shawarma into 'shish taouk,' and shish taouk being called 'chicken brochette.' That inspired the inception of Lulu, giving the diaspora a feeling of home, and introducing locals of other cultural backgrounds to our real food. 

Serving up authentic shawarma and well-made hummus is one thing, and introducing home-cooked classics like sayyadiyeh and shish barak in urban upscale restaurants is another.

As nostalgic as it feels, isn’t it dangerous for us to be so intimate? In a time where our culture is so endangered due to appropriation, aren’t we afraid of shining a light on what we eat and how we drink at home by bringing it out to the public? Are shawarma spots not good enough?

“As much as I love our street food and it should be celebrated, it doesn’t tell our whole story,” Soufian says.

“We’re trying to give people a glimpse into our own culture, with traditional dishes like kabab bil karaz (cherry kebab) and banadoura jabaliyeh (mountain-style tomatoes) using their ingredients like blueberries and Quebec tomatoes. (HENI is) a response to how we’ve made (Quebec) another home for us. It might look or feel different, but the flavours are damn there.”

HENI’s extensive wine selection is another way of changing the mainstream assumptions of our culture. 

“Most people don’t realize that we’ve been doing this for centuries. One of the oldest wine presses on record is in Lebanon,” HENI co-owner Rami El-Sabban tells me. 

“Lebanese wine is totally underrated,” Soufian agrees. “But even the Lebanese won’t give credit to their wines unless someone from the West validates it. Some schmuck with four restaurants in Montreal can go to Lebanon, try the wine, love it, and say they want to distribute it in their restaurant and people will only then celebrate how good our wine is.”

It’s our turn now in food and in wine, to get away from all that people thought they knew about us. We’re reclaiming the identity instead of playing into the fetishized colonized identity.

A new feeling of home

Local scenes for favourites like manakish flatbreads and saj wraps have also seen a change. Traditional breakfast staple manakish comes from a firin or a hole-in-the-wall bakery where you pick up your order and leave.

Café chez Téta is the elevated answer to what the diaspora was craving in downtown Montreal, and what a diverse audience needed for us to prove that we can keep up with the city’s expectations of us.

“We do have to keep up with the times.” owner Antoun Aoun shrugs. “Sure, we could’ve opened a small little firin but people here wouldn’t understand that. Downtown Montreal is not the market for that. People go to Haddad and Le Palais in Laval and Ville Saint Laurent for that sort of thing.”

"We aren’t trying to prove anything."

But ultimately, the inspiration for Café chez Téta was to create a nice, relaxed ambiance where one could get their coffee and their manakish at the same place while doing work or socializing. 

“We aren’t trying to prove anything. But I used to go to a cafe every day and have a croissant and a coffee and the croissant wouldn’t keep me full. So I thought, why can’t I have a coffee and manoucheh? At least a manoucheh is more substantial!” Antoun adds.

Antoun also points out that other nouveau Levantine cafés and restos that opened within the past few years came from Lebanese migrants to Montreal after the August 2020 Beirut blast.

“And this isn’t the first time this has happened. We saw this before with Syrian concepts after 2013, and of course, after the Civil War (in the 1980s) when people started coming here.” 

In Antoun’s opinion, people coming from the SWANA region are the ones bringing that newness here to mirror the elevation and innovation back home.

“If (only) you could see what’s happening in the Arab world—in Kuwait, Dubai, and even Beirut. If anything, I think we’re sticking to more traditional concepts here. Look at (restaurants like) Em Sherif… Za’atar W Zeit… they’re filled with innovation and Michelin-starred concepts. We’re keeping it simple and being more Arab here.”

And by recreating the feeling of being at your Teta’s (grandmother’s) house, they are keeping it simple and ambient at the same time, serving manakish, some salads and dips, coffee, sweet sfouf—even the decor is reminiscent of the wood-heavy ambiance of a grandmother’s house.

But there’s a bit of a twist with a small market, and additions to the menu like kafta with cheese on a manoucheh and falafel. It encapsulates the concept of ghorbeh, making do with what we have and mixing it up with what we’ve learned here to incorporate a new feeling of home.

The nouveau Levant

“It’s our turn now in food and in wine, to get away from all that people thought they knew about us. We’re reclaiming the identity instead of playing into the fetishized colonized identity,” says Omar Boubess, whose favourite pioneer of the nouveau Levantine experience is Damas. “What they’ve done is unmatched.” 

Since its opening in 2011, Damas paved the way for us to share our food with the masses at an elevated level, and it seems like the rest of the places are taking inspiration from that, whether they’re aware of it or not. 

As for whether or not we’re trying to adapt to Western palates? Maybe we are, a little bit, but we’re mostly being our fabulous selves, and Montreal is certainly responding to it.