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.