Lebanese entrepreneurs discover an appetite for snails
Snails, which are part of Lebanon’s culinary tradition, are juicy business for the country’s entrepreneurs.
Like any other day, the cooks of Le Petit Gris restaurant are busy preparing snails. There are many ways of serving them: in crunchy pastry with flavored butter, with scrambled eggs and sun-dried tomatoes, with cheese pasta or stuffed in large mushrooms.
For Makram Rabbath, the owner of the restaurant that takes its name from a garden snail variety, the food is a throwback to his childhood: “I started eating snails with my grandmother when I was 6 or 7 years old and it became a passion! The sky is the limit when you cook snails, because it can absorb whatever flavor you give it,” he told Al-Monitor.
For true connoisseurs, however, there is only one way of cooking snails — the traditional Lebanese recipe, where they are first boiled with cinnamon, bay leaves and onion. They are then served with a tarator sauce — a mix of sesame cream (tahini), lemon juice, garlic and parsley.
The vast majority of the snails prepared at Le Petit Gris are 100% Lebanese. Rabbath gets his supplies once a year, in autumn, from southern Lebanese families who pick wild snails from under olive and orange trees. He then boils and vacuum packs them for storage.
