|
HUGH MACLEOD LOSES HIS APPETITE AT A NEW THEMED EATERY IN BEIRUT
As if it needed any, Beirut has a few more guns and grenades to add to the collection. Only now, you can eat them for lunch.
In a country torn apart by civil war, devastated by Israeli bombardments and recently plunged into sectarian murder and mayhem by the unresolved status of Hezbollah’s weapons, a café where employees in military uniform serve “RPG” chicken sandwiches or “claymore” pizzas to the taped sounds of gunfire, might be considered in bad taste. But co-owner Yousef Ibrahim, the brains behind the Buns And Guns fast-food eatery in the heart of Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, cares less about sensibility, more about success.
“Customers might say the café is in bad taste, but then pay us a visit anyway,” says Ibrahim, a 27-year-old
computer science graduate who divides his time between Beirut and Los Angeles. “It’s not a big deal if people are saying it’s bad, so long as they’re talking.”
And talking they have been. After a Hezbollah victory rally following May’s clashes, tens of thousands of people, including your correspondent, filed past the café – whose exterior is encircled with sandbags and bears the logo “A sandwich can kill you” – as the sounds of live celebratory gun-fire rang out.
The eatery, which opened mid-May, has been featured on Hezbollah’s own Al-Manar television, as well as several local newspapers and international news organisations such as the BBC, AP and Time. The publicity is helping to draw around 200 customers per day to sample such rich delights as the “Kalashnikov”, a beef steak sandwich named after
the country’s most popular assault rifle, or the “155mm howitzer” burger. And for the truly famished there’s always the “Terrorist Meal”, a mix of rice, a sandwich and salad.
“The food is related to where the weapons come from,” explains Ibrahim, inside his café festooned with replica guns, camouflage, spent bullets and shells, collected, he said, from the neighborhood. “So, as the M16 is a gun made in the West we use a sub for the sandwich. As the Kalashnikov is what we use in the East, so we use pita bread in that sandwich.”
Culinary creativity, it seems, knows no bounds.
|
