Beirut Dries Up
Famous local beer is off the menu at Beirut beachfront café, finds Ramsay Short
A beer by the sea in the sunshine:there’s nothing quite like it and at legendary Beirut seafront café Rawda, a bottle of Lebanese local beer Almaza combined with a hubble-bubble water pipe and some pistachios has been the way of life for three decades.
Popular with Beirut’s writers, musicians, artists and left-wing intellectuals, Rawda is almost always packed. But now all has changed, reflecting a potential shift in the city’s cultural tendencies.
A new owner, son of the previous one, has taken over and banned alcohol. No Almaza, not even a glass of cool arak to be found and, evidently a religious man, he has installed a ladies prayer area too. This is much to the chagrin of the regulars. “Rawda is practically my second home,” says Rafik Majzoub, a Jordanian-Lebanese artist and poet. “Almaza here on the corniche is just the way it is. I can’t believe it.”
Word on the street is that the owner couldn’t care less about his loyal artist-intellectual-leftist customers and wants a more religious clientele. It has worked: the crowd has changed and there are numerous tourists from the Gulf sitting in the chairs last perched upon by local professors. It raises the question: are Arab tourist dollars from the famously conservative Gulf states going to change forever the famously liberal party town that is Beirut, the Paris of the Med?
Rawda Café, Corniche, Manara, +961 (1) 743 348. Open 8am to midnight daily.
