Lebanese Catering

Lebanese is the grill-and-mezze core of what most offices call Mediterranean, so start where the Lebanese kitchen does, at the charcoal. Shish tawook is chicken marinated in garlic, lemon, and yogurt, skewered and grilled until the edges char. Kafta is ground beef or lamb worked with onion, parsley, and spice, shaped onto skewers or into patties. Shawarma off the spit rounds out the proteins.

Then toum, the whipped garlic sauce, white and sharp and airy, that a Lebanese kitchen puts beside grilled chicken without being asked. Order extra. It disappears first, and it is what people remember. Rice with vermicelli and warm pita carry the plate, and pickled turnips, pink from beet, are the detail that says Lebanese.

A Lebanese mezze table uses its own names, and knowing four of them gets you a better order.

• Fattoush. The chopped salad with toasted pita shards, sumac, and lemon. It travels if the pita is packed separately.
• Moutabal. Smoky roasted eggplant blended with tahini. Many menus call it baba ghanoush.
• Kibbeh. Footballs of cracked wheat stuffed with spiced beef and pine nuts, fried. Count one or two a head as a hot mezze.
• Warak enab. Grape leaves rolled around rice, often meatless. They hold at room temperature all afternoon.

Hummus and tabbouleh belong too, and tabbouleh done the Lebanese way is mostly parsley, with the bulgur a minor part.

Few cuisines have a real breakfast dish that caters well. Lebanese has manakish: flatbread baked with a thick coat of za’atar in olive oil, or with cheese, or both, folded and eaten warm. A morning meeting fed on manakish, labneh with olive oil, olives, cucumbers, and tomatoes is a Beirut breakfast, and it costs about what a pastry tray does.

Ask whether the kitchen bakes manakish, since not every Lebanese catering partner has an oven set up for it. If it does, order za’atar and cheese in equal number, cut in wedges. Labneh is strained yogurt, thick enough to spread.

Mediterranean is a basket term, and Mediterranean catering is the right page for the whole basket. For the Lebanese version, scan the menu for words only a Levantine kitchen uses: toum, shish tawook, fattoush, moutabal, kibbeh, manakish, sumac. A menu that says garlic sauce, chicken kebab, and Greek salad is cooking something adjacent. In San Francisco, La Méditerranée has run this menu for decades, which is why it sits on our San Francisco corporate catering list.

Tell CaterAi you want toum and fattoush on the table, plus the headcount, and it picks kitchens that know what those are. The rest of the roster, Greek to Turkish to Israeli, sits in the cuisine directory.