Lebanese cuisine guide
Where it comes from
Lebanese cooking is the most widely travelled of the Levantine kitchens, and its structure is the mezze: many small dishes arriving together rather than a sequence of courses. Olive oil, lemon, garlic, tahini and burghul recur across the repertoire, with lamb the dominant meat and a large genuinely vegetarian core.
That vegetarian core is a commercial asset worth surfacing deliberately — mutabbal, tabbouleh, fattoush and many of the mezze are naturally plant-based, and guests filtering for it should find them immediately.
Allergens and dietary needs
Sesame is the first-order allergen, not an edge case: tahini is in hummus, in mutabbal, in many dressings and in halva. Pine nut and walnut appear in both savoury dishes and sweets, and wheat runs through burghul, bread and pastry.
Transliteration should be settled once and reused. Kibbeh, kibbe and kubba are all defensible; using two of them on one menu is not.
Naming it on an English-language menu
Settle one transliteration per dish and reuse it everywhere — menu, signage, delivery platforms. Kibbeh and kibbe are both defensible; using both halves your search presence for the dish.
Surface the plant-based core deliberately. Much of the mezze table is vegan by tradition rather than adaptation, which is a stronger claim than a substitution.
Staple ingredients
- olive oil
- tahini
- lamb
- bulgur