With a farmers’ market, and a string of restaurants and B&Bs, Kamal Mouzawak is helping Lebanese women and Syrian refugees to transform their lives
Kamal Mouzawak grew up in Jeita, a small town in the mountains north of Beirut, during the Lebanese civil war. One of his earliest memories was when his mother was out of the kitchen and he decided to make a cake. He thought to himself: ‘What is a cake?’ He stirred a slurry of flour, sugar and eggs in an empty sardine tin because he could not find a cake pan and cooked it on top of the stove. “It was a burnt omelette!” he laughed, remembering the experiment over lunch this spring in Beirut. “But what still amazes me is the metamorphosis of ingredients.”
Over the last decade, Mouzawak has created a recipe for transforming people’s lives through food. He now presides over a network of markets, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts and community outreach programmes in Lebanon. Some projects are non-profit, others for-profit, and through them Mouzawak has developed a model of social entrepreneurship that is as much about empowering people as selling products. His brings together farmers, chefs, NGOs, designers and artisans, connecting people to politicians and business to ethics. One morning, in his main restaurant in Beirut, I watched him conduct three business meetings simultaneously, moving from table to table, discussing photographs for a new cookbook, plans for a new restaurant and giving a quick briefing to a group of European journalists on a tour. His enterprise is called Souk el Tayeb. Souk is Arabic for market and tayeb is a useful word with several meanings, including good, kind, delicious. It signifies acceptance, acknowledgement and thank you all rolled into one.
Proof of change is in a bite of tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is proof of the possible
Continue reading...