Five Dishes to Try at Beity, Chicago’s Singular Lebanese Tasting Menu
Chicago has its fair share of tasting menus, but a Lebanese one, served family-style, is an entirely new genre in a city with few upscale Middle Eastern restaurants. Enter Beity, 27-year-old chef Ryan Fakih’s first restaurant, where he’s paying homage to his Lebanese heritage with a menu that feels personal, modern, and fun.
“My plan isn’t to cook traditional Lebanese food,” Fakih says. “It’s to reinvent the wheel and provide a fresh view on Lebanese cuisine.” Fakih grew up in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Europe, attending Swiss boarding school as a teen and graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. He first moved to Chicago in 2021 to work at Alinea, and says he learned a lot in his few months there.
“The reason I left is because I have involuntary tremors throughout my body,” Fakih says. “It makes it very hard to work for other people. It got really bad over the last few years. I left the industry for a little bit because I didn’t think I could work in a fine dining restaurant, or a restaurant, period.”
After applying for other jobs and working as a DoorDash driver, Fakih decided to give it another go, with investment support from his family, and his grandmother bombarding him with recipes and cooking videos on WhatsApp. Beity opened in August 2024, originally with a “Teta’s Tasting” menu dedicated to his grandmother, and the current menu is a more streamlined “Not Your Teta’s Tasting,” in which Fakih is freer to experiment and stray from tradition.
Along with the tasting menu, an a la carte bar bites menu is available, and the restaurant recently launched brunch.“Not Your Teta’s Tasting” is structured as a shared tasting menu served in four courses, with a handful choices to make along the way. Although the menu is subject to change, here are a few highlights from a recent meal.
MORE FROM RESY
1. Mezze
The first mezze course hits the table soon after you sit down, with fluffy fresh pita, herbed labneh, sweet and tangy muhammara, and creamy, parsley-spun hummus topped with confit lamb. “Lebanese cuisine is all about sharing, hence why I send the mezze in the beginning: to set that tone,” Fakih says. “I love mixing and matching food. And the way we make our pita is such a labor of love. I am constantly making pita and feeding the sourdough, every day and every night. It’s a time-intensive process and you can’t skip any steps.”
The mezze course showcases very distinct flavor profiles and gives a delicious hint of what’s to come. The labneh is made in-house with a blend of sheep, goat, and cow’s milk, strained for two days, and the muhammara is chunkier and more flavorful than most.
“I wanted to make muhammara the way I like it,” Fakih says. “I like texture, enough texture to taste the different components. If you blend it, it’s a soup. That’s not the point of it. We fold in the ingredients rather than just blending everything. The red pepper, pomegranate, and walnuts are crushed by hand. It’s very step by step to get the texture we want. This is the welcome to Beity and the welcome to Lebanese cuisine.”
2. Beet Shish Barak
Beets and goat cheese are popular together in salads, but Fakih takes the familiar combination in a different direction, with beet dumplings stuffed with goat cheese filling in a beet and yogurt sauce, accented with a sprinkle of mint and pickled slices of golden beets. “The base for shish barak is always yogurt, so I mixed that with beets,” he says. The result is a brilliant magenta sauce that’s striking enough to catch your eye from across the room.
Although shish barak are commonly filled with meat, Fakih took a vegetarian approach here, and it’s worth noting that the tasting menu is very vegetarian-friendly. “Dumplings are a way to feed bigger families, and to feed more with less, so I’m giving an ode to the way we grew up eating,” he says. “In Lebanon we make baked, fried, and boiled dumplings. We have fried dumplings on the a la carte menu, and I wanted to push the boundaries of what a shish barak could be on the tasting menu.”
3. Kibbeh Nayeh
Lamb is featured several times on Beity’s menu, and Fakih works with a Midwestern collective of farmers to source lamb from Michigan. “This dish is a mixture of Lebanese flavors with technique from my French background,” Fakih says. “I have an obsession with lamb. I wanted to showcase the meat in a way that’s on the gamier side, but not in a way that puts you off. It’s raw and beautiful.”
“French tartare typically has mustard and is on the more acidic side, while kibbeh nayeh is more raw meat and spice forward, but the acidity comes from pickled onion and cornichon,” he says. “In the mountains in Lebanon, they mix rose petals in, so I wanted to pay homage with the rose petals on the egg yolk.” Of course, the tartare comes with more pita – no complaints here.
4. Sayadieh
“Sayadieh means the ‘fisherman’s catch’ and whatever they caught, they would mix with rice, caramelized onions, and tahini sauce,” Fakih explains. “This dish has all of those components. There’s a caramelized onion mousse at the bottom, tahini incorporated with seasonal mushrooms, and the fish, which we make into a roulade and torch in a way so it’s nice and caramelized on top but still tender in the center.”
Main courses at Beity are served with a side of vermicelli rice, and Fakih recommends spooning the rice directly into the rich mushroom tahini gravy. “In Lebanon, we eat everything with bread and rice,” he says. “It goes back to the mix-and-matching. I would try my dish first, and then toss the rice straight into the sauce.”
5. Chocolate Arabic Coffee
There’s no dedicated pastry chef at Beity, and the kitchen is tiny, so Fakih came up with punchy desserts that are easy to prep and plate. This chocolate Arabic coffee cremeux is sprinkled with tahini crumble, crushed pistachios, and chocolate tuile.
“At the end of a meal in Lebanon, I usually love a coffee, so I wanted to bring those flavors to a dessert,” he says. “Arabic coffee is very finely ground and infused with cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, and we use our housemade seven spice blend.” Fakih believes that Iran has the best pistachios, and it’s one of the specialty ingredients he’ll purchase from Little Palestine in Bridgeview. And coffee for dessert gives you a second wind, you can always grab a seat at the bar for a nightcap.
Amber Gibson is a journalist specializing in travel, food, and wine. Her work has appeared in Departures, Food & Wine, Saveur, Bon Appétit, and Travel + Leisure. Follow her here; follow Resy, too.
