Most Lebanese will say that their cuisine, one of the most popular in the Middle East, rests on their specific spices, herbs, and fresh fruits and vegetables.
If you sit down to a Lebanese table, you will soon notice that presentation also plays a prominent part and that they rarely, if ever, eat alone.
Its start-up scene is broadly similar.
Mike Butcher, editor at large at TechCrunch, might have felt his mouth was on fire after “labelling a controversial government minister on a conference stage as an ‘idiot.”
He went on to describe the incident as not being “the wisest of moves” in an article he published after attending a tech start-up conference in Beirut.
Butcher was referring to a government official whose decisions caused the country’s average Internet speed to be much lower than in surrounding countries.
“A very low percentage of people in Lebanon shop online, whereas that percentage is much higher in the UAE,” says Karl Naim, co-founder of ChefXChange, an online private chef hiring service launched at the beginning of 2015.
In a short space of time, the online private chefs-foodies marketplace has grown rapidly with 500 chefs signing up on the platform to cook at the homes of the modern hosts in Washington, London, and Beirut, in addition to Dubai which has remained their primary market.
