Rifqa

Yes, you're right! The restaurant is Verre, although the chef is now the excellent Jason Atherton. Over to you.

Warm, but somewhere warmer.

Pressed terrine of winter game Braised pork with pan fried foie gras, shallots, baby leeks and truffled potatoes Earl Grey bavarois with watermelon granita (UK chef in another UK chef's outpost -- is that allowed?)

Carved Angel?

Byzantium is a rather interesting restaurant, (French-Mediterranean) although my memory of the food there is of an excess of balsamic vinegar. You can get a 'food lantern' for your starter or desert, with little tasters of lots of things, a bit gimmicky perhaps, but very enjoyable. The interior is impressive with a great view of St Mary Redcliffe church. The Lebanese restaurant (Sands) on Queens Road is good; nice olives, wine, and hearty mains, as well as sticky, fragrant puddings. I have eaten downstairs in the River Station in their cheaper bar/cafe several times and loved it. On the one occasion that I ate upstairs in the proper restaurant, just a couple of weeks ago, I didn't enjoy it at all. The food was very mediocre, relying on heavy, sweet flavours. The bread was strangely cold, and the service poor. Teohs (there are two branches: one in St Pauls and one in Bedminster) is an interesting place, hit and miss as well. It is a pan-Asian restaurant, and suffers from trying to cover too many countries. If you order well though (avoid Malaysian) it can be delicious, and it is ridiculously cheap.

Since when has Beirut been the dominant cultural centre for the region? In the Levant, Damascus was always a more important centre culturally and politically. In the eastern Mediterranean, Beirut was of little significance beside great cities like Alexandria, Cairo etc. Even in Lebanon, the northern port of Tripoli has traditionally been just as important as Beirut. Beirut did not attain any particular significance until after the First World War. Beirut in the 1950s and 1960s was an important and lively cultural centre, and its re-development since the civil war has been impressive. This has no doubt been important in the spread of Lebanese restaurants. The Suez Canal did not only involve passing maritime traffic. From the late 1860s, it hosted a large expatriate community employed in the administration and running of the operation. In the period before the First World War, most of the shipping passing through the Canal stopped at one of the major Egyptian ports (Alexandria, Port Said and Port Suez). Passengers on the ships would usually have the opportunity to go into Cairo while the ships were being re-provisioned and re-fuelled. A vast number of people from every part of the world, therefore, would have needed something to eat in all of these cities.

Have you heard of the Suez canal?

Egypt is traditionally the greatest meeting point between cultures in the region, standing at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean. Nowadays it attracts far more tourists than any other country in the Middle East.

One of the problems in talking about Middle Eastern cuisine is the difficulty there is in identifying particular dishes as being from one Middle Eastern country or another. Molokhieh, for example, is a very typically Egyptian dish (it is not Lebanese) as is pigeon. Other things, such as ta'amia (or felafel) have always been eaten in both Egypt and Sudan. It is true that Lebanon is a place where continents and cultures meet, but this can also be said of Egypt. Moreover, agriculture in Egypt is very well developed and rests after all on the most fertile soil found anywhere in the world. I think the reason for the ubiquity of Lebanese cuisine is just a result of the metonymic labelling of other Middle Eastern foods as Lebanese. Finally, surely the reason for the lack of variation in Saudi Arabian cuisine is not that it is "a closed off society", but that it was largely nomadic until very recently, as well as being mostly desert?