Zahle

Every Lebanese person I mentioned Zahle to before I went used the same phrase, almost verbatim: you have to eat by the river. The Berdawni River runs straight through the middle of town, and for a few hundred meters both banks are lined with restaurants whose tables spill out onto wooden platforms built directly over the water, close enough that you can hear it running under your chair while a waiter brings out the eleventh small plate you didn’t order but are somehow delighted to see anyway.

I went on a Friday with a Lebanese friend who treated the whole thing as a kind of ritual — arak poured slowly and cut with water until it turned that particular milky white, followed by an avalanche of mezze that seemed engineered never to actually stop: muhammara, batata harra, kibbeh, sujuk sizzling on a small skillet, warak enab still warm. Lunch started at half past noon and by the time we finished it was nearly five, the sun had moved entirely across the sky, and nobody at any of the surrounding tables seemed to think this was unusual.

Zahle earned its title as capital of the Bekaa’s wine and arak production honestly — the hills around town are covered in vineyards, and the local arak, distilled from grapes and aniseed, is considered by many Lebanese to be the finest in the country. I walked up into the old quarter afterward to work off some of the meal, past red-tile-roofed houses climbing the slope in tidy rows, church bells competing with each other the way they seem to everywhere in Christian Lebanon, and a view back down over the river restaurants that made the whole town look like it had been built specifically for this one long lunch.

When to go: September brings the grape harvest and a genuine buzz to the surrounding vineyards. Spring and early autumn weekends are ideal for the riverside restaurants, when the water is high and the terraces aren’t yet too crowded.