🇱🇧 Lebanon
Beirut
Beirut (بيروت — the capital and largest city of Lebanon, population 2.4 million in the greater metropolitan area) is one of the most complex and contradictory cities in the world: simultaneously the party capital of the Arab world (the nightlife runs from Thursday to Sunday without pause), a city still physically marked by the 1975–1990 Civil War and the catastrophic 2020 port explosion (the August 4, 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut — one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, equivalent to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, which killed 218 people, injured 7,000, destroyed 300,000 apartments and caused $15 billion in damage), and one of the richest food cultures in the Middle East. Lebanese cuisine is arguably the finest and most internationally influential in the Arab world: the mezze culture (the tradition of sharing 20–30 small dishes as an entire meal — hummus, tabbouleh, fattoush, kibbeh, labneh, baba ghanoug, muhamara, sambousek — each dish a world of its own), the grilled meats (kafta, shish taouk, lahm meshwi), the seafood from the Mediterranean, and the Lebanese breakfast (the most extensive and beautiful breakfast tradition in the Arab world).