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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
6 Min
06/03/2026
Think of the dinner scenes in Call Me by Your Name, of long tables, sun-soaked plates, everyone reaching across each other, or the lavish family feasts in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where food is basically a supporting character. Or even the animated chaos of Ratatouille, where the joy of cooking is less about precision and more about generosity and sharing. That is the essence of Lebanese food, with a preference for abundance over aesthetics, shared plates over individual portions, and conversation as important as the food itself.
As fanciful and daunting as the above might have sounded, most of Lebanese food is shockingly easy to make at home. No complicated techniques, no hard-to-find ingredients and dishes that just focus on flavours, fresh herbs, spices, lemon, and plenty of olive oil doing the heavy lifting.
Before you start cooking Lebanese food at home, a few key tips make all the difference. First, get the right tahini as cheap versions can be bitter and ruin classics like hummus and baba ganoush, so choose one made from just roasted sesame seeds. Always use fresh lemon juice, and olive oil isn’t optional either – it’s a central flavour, not just a cooking medium. Finally, serve everything together as a part of a mezze platter.
This is the one most people already know, but homemade hummus is a different beast from the tub you buy at the supermarket. The trick is using dried chickpeas soaked overnight (or canned ones cooked a little longer), good-quality tahini, fresh lemon juice, and cold water blended in at the end to get that silky texture. Top it with a drizzle of olive oil, a pinch of paprika or Aleppo pepper, and serve with warm pita, and that's it. Takes about 10 minutes of active effort.
This Middle Eastern salad is not an afterthought, and the perfect Lebanese food with a spread of heavy and greasy food. It's a parsley salad with a little bulgur wheat in it. Getting the ratio of the ingredients is crucial for this fresh and herby Levantine salad, popular in Syria and Lebanon. The salad uses loads of flat-leaf parsley, fresh tomatoes, a bit of soaked fine bulgur, spring onions, lemon juice, and olive oil. No cooking required here, and no complicated steps.
Baingan bharta gets the Mediterranean treatment with this brinjal-based dish, which is smoky and creamy. Because the dish is super indulgent, it loosely translates to ‘spoiled dad’ or ‘pampered papa’. Just like baingan bharta, you roast an eggplant directly over a flame (or under a grill) until it’s completely charred on the outside and cooked inside. The flesh is scooped out, mixed with tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and a drizzle of olive oil. Baba ganoush is part of a mezze platter, complete with pita bread, raw vegetables and grilled meat.
Protein has been the focus of Indian diets quite recently, and if you are looking for variety beyond curd and yoghurt, try this Lebanese food called labneh. Plain yoghurt and salt are mixed and drained through a cheesecloth for half a day or more until thick. It's eaten for breakfast with olive oil and za'atar, used as a dip, or spread inside a flatbread sandwich. If you've ever had shrikhand or chakka dahi in a Maharashtrian home, you are already familiar with this kind of dish.
Lentils and rice are cooked together, topped with deeply caramelised onions for this delicious rice dish, called mujadara. It's sometimes called the ‘poor man's food’ across the Levant region, but anyone who has eaten it knows that this dish has no compare. It’s not the rice, but the caramelised onions part where the patience comes in. It takes a low heat setting with a lot of stirring, about 30 to 40 minutes, until they're sweet, dark, and almost jam-like. Everything else is just lentils and rice cooked with cumin.
The name might have given it away; this Lebanese food is simply spicy potatoes. In this dish, potatoes are cubed and fried or roasted until crispy, then tossed with garlic, chilli, fresh coriander, and lemon juice. It's a mezze staple, and it's the kind of side dish that disappears first from the table, who does not love fried potatoes anyway. The dish is thought to originate from Lebanon but is also common in Syria. It works as a starter, a side, or honestly just as a snack. Best consumed fresh, for leftovers don't stay crispy.
There are a handful of variations of these semolina cakes across the Middle East, and the Lebanese people call theirs namoura or basbousa. The semolina cake is soaked in sugar syrup and is dense, moist, and lightly sweet. Some versions are flavoured with rose water and orange blossom water. It bakes in one pan, cuts into diamonds or squares, and keeps well for a few days. The syrup soaks in as it cools, so a little restraint is advised from cutting into it immediately.
Lebanese food earns its reputation because the food is genuinely mouthwatering, hitting the right spots on your olfactory senses and is genuinely easy to find. You don't need a clay oven or obscure ingredients, and most of these dishes come together with things already in your kitchen. Start with hummus or tabbouleh if you're new to it. Work your way to mujadara on a slow Sunday andmake basbousa when you want something sweet that isn't complicated.