Mezze is a group project and you are doing it alone

The most common mistake people make with Lebanese food is ordering it like it is their food. One person, one plate, an appetiser and then a main. You cannot do it. The format is wrong and the food will be worse, not because the kitchen failed but because you have taken a thing built for eight and asked it to be a thing built for one.

How it actually works

Mezze is not a course. It is the whole meal arriving in pieces, over an hour and a half, in no fixed order, while everyone talks. The table fills up, plates get pushed around, something gets ordered again halfway through because it was good. There is no moment where the starters end.

Which means the unit of ordering is not a dish. It is the table.

A table that works

• Something cold and sharp: tabbouleh, which is a parsley salad with some bulgur in it, not a bulgur salad with some parsley in it. If it arrives beige, you are in the wrong place.
• Something creamy: hummus, or better, moutabal — the smoky aubergine one.
• Something fried: falafel, or kibbeh if they make it themselves.
• Something raw: kibbeh nayyeh if you trust them, and you should only order it in a place you would trust with worse.
• Something grilled, late: this is the closest thing to a main course and it should arrive when everyone is already half full. That is correct. Do not hurry it.
• Bread, continuously. Not as a side. As cutlery.

Arak, water, ice — in that order, into the glass. The other order clouds wrong and someone's uncle will tell you so.

The part I actually want to say

I have eaten a lot of very good Lebanese food in restaurants and none of it has been as good as a mediocre version of the same thing at a table with ten people at it and an argument happening at the far end. That is not nostalgia talking. The food is genuinely built to be better under those conditions. It gets shared, it gets cold, it gets picked at, it goes round again.

Eat it with people. If you have no people, get people. That is the recipe.