GROUNDS

Cafe Younes was founded in 1935 by Anis Younes on Hamra Street and is the longest-running specialty coffee operation in Lebanon. The original bar still trades on Nehme Yafet Street near the founding site and the company also operates as a roaster, which makes it one of the few continuous coffee operations in the Middle East to have held the same trade through multiple wars and currency collapses. Most Beirut residents treat Younes as the city's coffee reference point.

Lebanese coffee in the heritage register is Turkish-style: finely ground, brewed in a long-handled rakwe with cardamom, and served in small cups with the grounds settling at the bottom. The vocabulary distinguishes between sada, mazbout, and helou, which mark levels of sugar from none to heavy. The same register runs across Hamra street cafes, Mar Mikhael rooms, and household kitchens. Coffee here is structurally hospitable: guests are offered a cup on entering and the order is taken seriously.

The contemporary specialty wave is younger and has built inside a city shaped by repeated structural shocks. The Lebanese civil war ran from 1975 to 1990 and reset the central districts. The August 2020 port explosion damaged a significant share of the cafes in Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh, two of the city's principal cafe corridors. Several rooms reopened within months. Kalei Coffee Co. opened in Geitawi in 2018 and is the operation most cited for the modern third wave register. Urbanista runs across multiple locations. Backburner Coffee operates a smaller technical bar. Tawlet, in Mar Mikhael, runs as a food-forward room with a coffee program embedded in the broader Lebanese food revival movement.

Beirut held a pre-war reputation as the Paris of the Middle East and the older cafe culture reflected that: extended sitting, newspapers, conversation as the principal activity. The contemporary register has compressed the timeline but preserved the orientation. Most specialty bars are designed for sitting rather than for takeaway. Prices run between sixty thousand and two hundred thousand Lebanese lira for a milk drink at a specialty bar in 2026, a range that shifts with the lira's exchange rate. Many operators now price in US dollars. The cup quality at the top of the market has stabilized through a decade of currency volatility, and the city's serious drinkers continue to move between the heritage rakwe register and the espresso bar within a single morning.