Souk el Tayeb

1 · POSITION

Souk el Tayeb, the good market, was created in Beirut in 2004 by Kamal Mouzawak as Lebanon’s first farmers’ market. It brings small producers from the villages to sell to the city in person, and it was made deliberately as neither a shop nor a restaurant. It is entered here as a market that became the root of a hospitality movement: kitchens, guest houses and village feasts grew out of it. [1, 2]

2 · THE SATURDAY MARKET

The market runs on Saturdays from nine until two. In 2015 it gathered around a hundred small producers from across Lebanon at the Beirut Souks on Trablos Street; it now trades on Armenia Street in Mar Mikhael. Its founder describes the aim simply as farmers coming to meet the people who buy their produce, and it is credited with bringing communities divided by the civil war to the same stalls. [1, 2, 3]

3 · FROM MARKET TO TABLE AND BED

Village food and harvest celebrations followed in 2007. Tawlet, the farmers’ kitchen, opened in 2009, with a different woman from a different region cooking the buffet each day; regional Tawlets followed in the south and the north, and the kitchens now stand in Mar Mikhael, Ammiq and Bakish. Beit, guest homes in traditional houses, began in 2015 in Douma and Ammiq. [1, 2]

4 · AFTER THE EXPLOSION

After the Beirut port explosion of 2020 the Tawlet team cooked with World Central Kitchen to feed the people clearing the streets. The enterprise runs cooking training for Syrian refugees and migrant workers, and shared meals with Palestinian refugees; a grant now supports turning the market into a daily community space rather than a Saturday one. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The market’s sites are given differently by date — the Beirut Souks in 2015, Mar Mikhael on its own site today — and the sources read do not record when or why it moved. The claim to be the first farmers’ market in Lebanon is the enterprise’s own and is repeated by the press; it is not independently established here. [1–3]