Cultured Traveler: Call It Beyrouth: Beirut With a French Accent

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 31 Agustus 2013 | 17.36

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

At Villa Clara, the menu is in French.

I was finishing an aperitif on the porch at Villa Clara while other guests tossed pétanque balls in the nearby yard. The hotel's 4-year-old namesake cozied up to her papa, showing off her latest crayon creation. "Oh, c'est magnifique," said Olivier Gougeon, a French chef and an owner of the property with his wife, Marie-Hélène, an editor of a French-language home décor magazine.

The tiny boutique hotel, its restaurant and guest rooms stocked with Parisian antiques, opened last year around the corner from an Asterix chicken shack and across the street from its neighborhood boucherie. But this was not Marseille or Lyon, it was the eastern edge of Beirut.

"A Frenchman can easily live in Beirut without feeling displaced," said Mr. Gougeon, who moved to the Lebanese capital from Paris in 1999, as he sipped local wine in Villa Clara's leafy backyard after cooking a dinner of crispy-skinned duck confit and old-fashioned île flottante.

For more than a century, through all manner of turmoil, including a 15-year civil war and, more recently, ongoing conflict in neighboring Syria, a distinctly French character has pervaded the city. Much of it is the legacy of the French colonial period — the mandate that lasted from 1920 to 1943 — but a cultural kinship goes back much further than that.

I had come to Beirut to see just how much French influence remains, and discovered an East-West blend more complex and layered than ever. Having left the country for France during particularly troubled times, many affluent Beirutis have returned, bringing with them cravings for Parisian life. A younger generation, meanwhile, has embraced a new hybrid culture — a French, Anglo and Arabic stew — evident in shops and restaurants and trilingual discussions across the city.

On an immediate level, Frenchness is everywhere — and, even for a first-time visitor, awfully easy to spot. Beirutis, though, sometimes take it for granted. "I don't think there's much French influence anymore," a resident might insist, as you wander past the neighborhood bistro Goutons Voir serving "salade Nice-Beyrouth"; the jewel-box boutique of La Ferme St. Jacques, a local foie gras producer; and the retail shop of Domaine des Tourelles, a winery in the Bekaa Valley founded by a French engineer in 1868. But big international chains are increasingly replacing mom-and-pop Francophile spots, and the mandate-era buildings that house them are giving way to sky-high steel and glass condos.

Some locals are trying to protect that architectural legacy, a mix of stone mansions and low-rise Haussmannian towers. "This house is in danger," said Giorgio Tarraf, a young preservation activist, during a tour of the city's vanishing landmarks, as he pointed at the carcasses of once-magnificent homes, abandoned during the civil war that started in 1975.

For the last three years Mr. Tarraf's group, Save Beirut Heritage, has been fighting a losing battle to restore these old buildings instead of tearing them down. "At the end of the war we had a golden opportunity to have a beautiful, well-preserved city," he said. "We chose to ignore that." The group's new iPhone app features an interactive map noting the status of each site: "urgent," "saved" or "too late."

We cut past the Grand Theater, said to be modeled after the old opera house in Paris; Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier performed there in the 1930s. During the civil war the theater, by then a partial ruin set along the Green Line dividing East and West Beirut, began to show pornographic films to fighters on both sides. Now developers want to turn it into a boutique hotel designed by the architect Richard Rogers. Preservationists would prefer to see the site's original character retained. "We're lobbying to have a theater in there or a cinema," Mr. Tarraf said, "accessible not just to people paying $500 a night."

Driving down the Avenue de Paris, along the Corniche, the palm-tree-lined esplanade that hugs the city's Mediterranean coast, I gazed up at a defunct lighthouse, striped like a barber pole, that was built by the French in the 1920s. Our destination was the 19th-century home next door, the last of its kind in the neighborhood, known simply as the Pink House.


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