Onno

Bourj Hammoud is where the Armenian community clusters, skilfull hands and dark smiles and knowing eyes. In 1915, the Turks killed and raped and drove them out of their homeland and across Europe, where hundreds of thousands died as they walked, their bodies left to rot by the roadside. Their past unacknowledged still today in Turkey, they cannot forgive and forget why they came to the Lebanon that is now their home. The shops are cheap but mostly found by luck and insider knowledge, and people’s Arabic is often broken. Domestic workers from the Philippines, from India, from Ethiopia migrate here on their rare days off for the cheap goods and maybe the solidarity of exile, and on a good day the air smells of basterma and soujouk* and cinnamon and fresh bread baking. Like so much of Beyrouth, the beauty is thickly veiled behind the dirt-grey buildings battered by bullets and by years, with their shawls of tattered, air-stained striped balcony curtains and sprawling guts of shop fronts – bright plastic, fake labels, tinfoil and gas lamps, posters protesting the Armenian president’s recent accord with Turkey and suspicious-looking hole-in-the-wall sandwich shops.

Onno is a tiny restaurant to one side of a vile underpass beneath one of Beyrouth’s favourite gargantuan flyovers. James’s sense of direction fails us and we walk in misdirected circles for nearly an hour before a youth on a moped, scorpion tattooed on his neck, takes pity and buzzes on ahead to show us the way. The proprietors seem none too pleased to see us and our guide turns out to be a well-known local troublemaker. Still smarting from our reception, we shuffle upstairs to a beige room hung with framed black and white postcards of Old Beyrouth, where a table of fat men with extravagant moustaches heaves with glorious outbursts of gurgling smoke-thick laughter.

The red wine is good and comes with small plates of chopped olives with heavy oil and walnuts, fine Arabic flatbread warm with cinnamon, something wonderful based on tomatoes, and stuffed vine leaves that drip olive oil down your arm. Then there is chopped fried liver that changes my mind about eating organs and hummus hamra, the chickpeas red with heavy spices that colour the whole world new. The fattouch salad is dressed with mythical pomegranate molasses that leaves you drenched in taste as if it would be a sin to eat anything after it. But the main event is still to come – soujouk pinched into pastry, chopped and fried and folded into a warm bowl of spiced yoghurt, and lamb cooked with cashew nuts in a thick, sweet, dark sauce of cherries. Soon Ian is telling filthy stories and our laughter is as well-fed and full of joie de vivre as our neighbours’.

We walk back to Dora past Armenian shops called Gargossian Uniforms and Missed Call, the borough vastly improved for being quiet and lamp-lit in the dark. The way is clear, the night is warm, the cherries are still sweet on our tongues.



* Types of heavenly, heavily spiced Armenian sausage.