The World’s 10 Best Lebanese Restaurants
Lebanese restaurants invite diners into a style of eating built around abundance, hospitality, and the pleasure of sharing. Mezze spreads bring together small plates that may include salads, dips, vegetables, pastries, and savory specialties, allowing a table to sample widely rather than settle on a single main dish. That communal rhythm is a defining part of the Lebanese dining experience and helps explain why Lebanese restaurants travel so well across cities around the world. At the heart of the cuisine are bright herbs, olive oil, grains, lemon, yogurt, chickpeas, and grilled or baked preparations that balance freshness with comfort. Dishes such as tabbouleh and kibbeh are closely associated with Lebanese food culture, while regional restaurant menus often extend into wider Levantine traditions. The result is a cuisine that can feel both light and generous, especially when served as a long, leisurely meal. In global dining capitals, Lebanese restaurants often work as neighborhood anchors as much as destination dining rooms. Some lean formal and celebratory, while others emphasize everyday dishes, street-food flavors, or bakery-style specialties. However they are styled, the appeal is the same: a cuisine that is vivid, flexible, and rooted in the convivial act of sharing food at the table.
Em Sherif Restaurant
Lebanon
Em Sherif Restaurant serves Lebanese cuisine on Damascus Street in Beirut’s Monot district. Its approach centres on the country’s culinary traditions, presented through a generous set-menu format that encourages guests to experience a sequence of dishes together. The dining room gives the meal a formal, celebratory setting. The restaurant is part of Mireille Hayek’s wider Em Sherif group, whose separate café, seafood and deli concepts offer different interpretations of Lebanese food. The Beirut restaurant remains the dedicated traditional dining concept, with daily lunch service at its Monot address.
Liza
Paris, France
Liza is a Lebanese restaurant at 14 rue de la Banque in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, identifiable as the Paris site of the Liza business rather than its Panache branch in the 9th. The official site presents it as a restaurant and delivery operation open for lunch and dinner through most of the week, with a Sunday brunch service, while the MICHELIN Guide also lists it in the same address and categorises it as Lebanese cuisine. According to the restaurant’s own pages, Liza centres its cooking on Lebanese mezze designed for sharing, alongside grilled dishes and menu formats for lunch, dinner and brunch. The menu language stresses fresh produce and recipes that are reworked with care, rather than a fixed bistro formula, and the site also notes options for smaller parties, larger tables and private hire. The dining room is described by the MICHELIN Guide as bright, with Middle Eastern touches, and by the restaurant itself as a joyful, festive setting for meals with friends or family. MICHELIN highlights that the kitchen gives pride of place to dishes from Beirut, with vegetarian choices and a selection of Lebanese wines, which helps define the character of the room as a contemporary, urbane take on Lebanese dining in central Paris. Liza therefore reads as a neighbourhood restaurant with a broad service profile: sit-down meals, brunch, take-away and delivery, plus arrangements for private groups. Its appeal lies in the combination of Lebanese sharing plates, grilled specialities, and a decorative style that aims to evoke Beirut without feeling thematic or formal, making it a distinct Paris address rather than a generic Mediterranean venue.
Al Beiruti
Dubai, UAE
Al Beiruti is a Lebanese restau-café in Dubai, UAE, operating under the Al Beiruti brand and currently listed on the official UAE site with locations at Umm Al Sheif on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai Hills Mall, and Palm Jumeirah Mall. The site’s story page presents the concept as a blend of restaurant and homey café, shaped around Lebanese hospitality and an all-day dining feel. The menu is broad and strongly rooted in Lebanese cooking. The UAE menu includes breakfast platters, eggs, labneh, hummus, foul, fatteh, salads, cold and hot mezze, raw meat dishes, grilled items, daily dishes, sandwiches and children’s dishes. This indicates a venue that can serve both a light café meal and a fuller lunch or dinner, with a particular emphasis on shared mezze and grill plates. Official descriptions also point to a live cooking element, with a show kitchen integrated into the dining experience. The menu pages show a wide spread of dishes such as tabbouleh, fattoush, kebbeh, shish taouk, kafta, shawarma and assorted pastries, alongside Lebanese coffee and tea pairings for breakfast sets. The overall impression is of a casual but polished Lebanese dining room rather than a narrowly focused takeaway outlet. In practical terms, Al Beiruti appears to suit guests looking for a sociable meal with a substantial range of Lebanese staples, from breakfast through to grilled mains and desserts. Its Dubai branches are presented as part of a wider regional operation, yet the verified material for this profile centres on the UAE locations and the restaurant’s menu-led, café-style character.
Mayrig Yerevan
Armenia
Mayrig Yerevan brings Western Armenian and Mediterranean cooking to Amiryan Street. Opened in 2018, it extends a restaurant story that began in Beirut in 2003, when founder Alin Kamakyan set out to preserve recipes inherited from her grandmother, who had migrated from Musaler to Lebanon. The name means mother, reflecting the family transmission of recipes at the centre of the concept. Mediterranean ingredients and Silk Road spices shape the food, with contrasts in texture, colour and flavour part of its approach. The Yerevan restaurant connects that diaspora culinary heritage with a setting in Armenia itself.
Comptoir Libanais
London, UK
Comptoir Libanais is a restaurant in London, UK.
Abd el Wahab
Beirut, Lebanon
Abd el Wahab is a Lebanese restaurant in Beirut’s Sodeco area, on Abd el Wahab El Inglizi Street in Ashrafieh. The operator says the business began on that street in 1999 and presents the original Beirut branch as the foundation of the name and concept. Its official materials describe a restaurant rooted in Lebanese food traditions while also aiming for a contemporary dining experience in the city centre. The menu is broad and built around classic Lebanese and oriental cooking. Verified sections include salads, raw meat specialities, hot starters, fish, grilled dishes, sandwiches, platters and desserts. Named dishes include tabbouleh, fattouch, hommos, moutabbal, fatté variations, taouk, kafta, lamb cutlets, kebbeh on skewers and knefeh, alongside other sweets such as ashta-based desserts and mhalabieh. The Beirut branch offers dine-in alongside takeaway and delivery, and the published delivery menu shows a sizeable range rather than a narrow selection of house signatures. Its structure supports both mezze-style ordering and fuller grill-led meals, with platters and mixed dishes available for sharing. The official presentation also links the restaurant with traditional Lebanese culture, expressed through a setting intended to feel comfortable and contemporary. Independent Beirut listings place Abd el Wahab in a central Ashrafieh location and note terrace dining, reinforcing its urban, relaxed character. The branch therefore reads as a long-established neighbourhood restaurant rather than a formal destination venue, with a focus on familiar Lebanese dishes, shared plates and a setting suited to leisurely meals. The available evidence supports the Beirut Sodeco branch as an active restaurant with a well-defined local identity.
Ilili
New York, USA
Ilili is a restaurant in New York, USA.
Beit Rima
San Francisco, USA
Beit Rima is a restaurant in San Francisco, USA.
Tawlet
Lebanon
Tawlet is Souk El Tayeb's Farmers' Kitchen, founded in Beirut's Mar Mikhael district in 2009 and subsequently extended to other Lebanese locations, including Ammiq in the West Bekaa and Bakish. Local cooks prepare homemade dishes from their own regions, making Lebanon's culinary variety the organising principle of the food. The open-kitchen approach encourages conversation about dishes and their origins, carrying the hospitality of a Lebanese home into the restaurant. Tawlet also operates as a social business, with profits supporting farmers, cooks and food producers. Work by local artists, artisans and designers shapes the interiors, connecting the dining spaces with the same community-based approach as the cooking.
Zaatar w Zeit
Canada
Zaatar w Zeit is a restaurant in Canada.