As you enter the cafés and restaurants of Beirut, the air is thick with smoke.  However, this smoke wafts in the smell of tobacco with aromas of grapes, apples, cherries and mint.  Unlike what you may find in American cafés, the Lebanese enjoy a nargileh, or hubbly bubbly with their cup of coffee.  In addition to customers choosing from a menu of hot and cold beverages, there is also the option for tobacco on the menu, and everyone is ordering.  Men and women, young and old, everyone is puffing on a water pipe. As a result, there are incongruous sights everywhere, such as women in traditional religious head scarves puffing away, couples sharing a pipe and conversation, and people working on laptops, wreathed in smoke.  The entire room has a haze through which you can make out customers sitting in chairs and on sofas drinking, smoking, talking, and playing shesh besh, or backgammon.

In this particular café, a café mocha costs about 4500 LL or $3 US, while a nargileh costs about 10000 LL, or $6 US, and can be smoked for up to two hours.  How does it work? A waiter brings the nargileh over with the tobacco ordered already inside.  In addition to regular tobacco, there are milder, flavored tobaccos.  Flavors include grape, lemon, cherry, apple and mint. There is water in the bottom of the hookah, and the pipe comes from the middle.  On the top is the tobacco.  You are handed your own sealed, plastic wrapped tip that fits into the tube, ensuring that each person receives a fresh mouthpiece.  An attendant comes by with glowing embers that are placed on the top of the tobacco.  Periodically he will replenish them as they cool. You inhale deeply, causing the water in the bottom chamber to bubble and sucking the flavor of the tobacco into your mouth.  It is strong and relaxing at the same time.  You get an intense hit of tobacco and flavor, but it is also relaxing as you hear the water bubble and exhale the smoke.  

The atmosphere brings back memories of cafés past, when people sat drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and arguing politics.  Going into a Western style café seems antiseptic compared to this traditional experience.  It is a luxurious pastime, and the occupants spend hours sitting, drinking, smoking and relaxing.  People are enjoying their drinks here, but this is more about the atmosphere.  In Beirut, as in the United States, the “Third Place,” the space between home and work where friends congregate and relax, is alive and well, but with a very different feel, flavor and aroma.

Woman in headscarf smoking

Two men playing shesh-besh at table

A nargileh with tobacco

Man placing more embers on top of the nargileh

What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.

As part of my journeys in Beirut, I explored the city’s many cafés to gain an insider’s perspective on their coffee culture. One café experience in particular stood out to me for its dedication to quality, atmosphere and flavor.

Visiting and talking with friends is what Dardar Chat Café is all about. In fact, its very name means to mingle and chat in Arabic. It combines the atmosphere of a typical Lebanese café with outstanding coffee, drinks and pastries. On the menu are specialty coffee drinks, pastries, food and nargileh, or hubbly bubbly water pipes for smoking tobacco. The attention to detail is pervasive. Karim, the owner, is a young entrepreneur who started the café in his early 20’s and already operates a second location, and will open a third location soon. He designed the interior himself, and oversees every detail of the operation. Karim uses a coffee blend he developed, which is custom roasted for him by a local coffee roaster. He trains his baristas extensively, and they carefully prepare each drink to exact standards. Hot and cold, iced and frozen, all reflect his unbelievable attention to quality. He is fastidious about choosing everything in his shop himself, and even makes the pastries daily.

We visited the café with our Lebanese distributor who brought samples of some of our different products for Karim to test. Unlike many customers who simply taste a chocolate syrup from the bottle and pronounce it suitable or not, Karim directed his barista to make a hot and frozen drink using the sauce I brought and one with the sauce they currently use. After tasting both, he decided he preferred what I brought for the hot drink, but not the frozen one. He told me he wasn’t willing to switch suppliers if the sauce didn’t perform better in both. From my sample bag, I gave him a bottle of another flavor of chocolate syrup, a single origin chocolate syrup made with a very distinctive cocoa powder from Ghana. His barista mixed two more drinks. This time there was a pronounced difference. The new drink was darker, thicker and had a much more intense chocolate flavor than the other. I told him that the new syrup was made with a different cocoa powder, and informed him that it would cost more. He smiled. “I like this one. It has a much better flavor than the other one, and to me, the flavor is always more important than the cost. I will switch,” he said.

The café is not in a prominent location, but has built a strong, repeat clientele solely based on word-of-mouth. Dardar Chat is open from 7:30 a.m. until 3 a.m. every day, and draws a fairly young, eclectic crowd. Unlike the chic, well dressed men and women at the Costa Coffee or Starbucks in downtown Beirut, his clientele comes for the relaxed atmosphere, personalized service and, of course, the nargileh. At any given time about a third of the patrons are puffing contentedly on their water pipes, and the fragrance of tobacco floats through the air. At other tables, one hears sharp clicks as dice bounce off the end of a shesh-besh board, then players move their backgammon pieces accordingly. When we were there, every table was taken. By focusing on the basics—quality coffee drinks, personalized service, and a relaxing atmosphere, Dardar Chat has carved a niche for itself in a very crowded café market.

Two women and a man smoking nargilehs and playing shesh-besh

Outside sign of Costa Coffee shop in Beirut

Outside sign of Starbucks Coffee shop in Lebanon

Two girls at table laughing and smoking nargilehs

Chocolate was introduced to Europe by the Spaniards and became a popular beverage by the mid 1600s.

Looking for an extraordinary book? You might try Banker to the Poor, which details how Muhammad Yunus, a banker and economist, pioneered the concept of microcredit, or small loans, to villagers in his native Bangladesh. The loans originally were given to women too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans and provided them with working capital to sustain their small businesses.

Yunus, a former economics professor, maintains that everyone has an entrepreneur’s skills and abilities, and that unleashing those skills throughout the world can help end poverty by making people self-sufficient. One of the great restrictions these would-be entrepreneurs face, according to Yunus, is the access to enough capital to give their entrepreneurial efforts a boost.

Grameen Bank is the lending institution that Yunus founded in Bangladesh to provide funds in relatively small amounts – $20, $50, $80 – to give these women the opportunity to generate their own living.

Remarkably, by making the repayment terms weekly, and having the women (and later all loan recipients) work in groups, the repayment rate of these loans is over 99 percent. The profound impact the loans have on lives makes for inspiring stories, illustrating how each person has the ability to succeed at business if given the opportunity.

Yunus and Grameen Bank subsequently shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for efforts to create economic and social development from the bottom up. This is a remarkably inspiring book, and a work that makes one reconsider the priorities that we find so pressing every day. Really, in the greater scheme of things, often they are not that important.