Lebanon

Kasr El Helou · Abdul Hamid Karami Street, Tripoli

Tripoli takes sweets seriously enough to have produced dynasties. The Hallab story begins in 1881 with a small sweets business in the old city and eventually expands into Kasr El Helou: trays of baklava, maamoul, knefeh, halawet el jibn and enough pistachio to make restraint seem culturally inappropriate. Generations of the family turned the original shop into a Lebanese ritual; a box from Hallab is not merely dessert but what arrives at a house, celebration or airport when showing up empty-handed would constitute a minor social failure. Eat there first. Knefeh and cream-filled sweets have temperature, texture and a very short window in which they are behaving exactly as intended. Then buy the box. There will always be a box.

Old Batroun · Street 902, Zone A

In Batroun, a family has managed to turn lemonade into an inheritance. The Hilmis trace their lemonade business to 1888, when the sisters' great-grandfather began selling lemonade, ice cream and sahlab in a town surrounded by citrus trees. Four generations later, the current House of Lemonade has thirteen flavors, desserts, ice cream and enough yellow branding to make the lemon's involvement impossible to overlook. Ignore the elaborations initially. Classic lemonade. Very cold. Then walk through Batroun drinking it. One hundred and thirty-eight years of development have failed to produce a better use for a lemon.

Kefraya · West Bekaa Valley

Michel de Bustros began building Château Kefraya in 1946 on a hill with Roman remains, planted vines in 1951 and started producing estate wine in 1979, in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War. That is an unusually Lebanese foundation story. The estate now covers roughly 300 hectares of terraced vineyard at around 1,000 metres in the West Bekaa, crossing a tectonic fault and growing everything from Cabernet and Syrah to indigenous Lebanese grapes. There are old Roman traces, underground tombs, a cellar holding a thousand barrels, clay amphorae, arak stills and a château sitting underneath Mount Barouk. Do the tour. The point is the scale of the place and the improbable continuity of wine in a landscape that has been producing it for millennia and interrupting almost everything else with considerable regularity. Then taste. Lebanon has been making wine longer than most countries have existed. No need to rush it.