Beirut Basics – Coffee, Tobacco & Conversation

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