We Only Closed Two Days
By Alain Bejjani, Bread and Salt Sourdough Cafe
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It didn't start with bread.
It started with a question — why does everything we eat have ingredients we can't fully account for? Before Bread and Salt existed, before the bakery, before the farmers market, there was just an idea: food made slowly, ethically, entirely from scratch. Every element understood. Every ingredient justified.
Bread was supposed to be a small part of that idea. One ingredient among many.
Then I started researching it.
There were no trending articles to find, no Instagram accounts to follow. Sourdough in 2013 was not a lifestyle or a movement — it was an ancient method that had been largely forgotten in favor of faster, cheaper, more predictable alternatives. I found myself going deeper than search results could take me — books, monastery guides, ancient recipes, historical texts tracing bread back to its origins. The further I went, the more I understood that what most people called bread had quietly drifted very far from what bread had always been.
Somewhere in those months of research, bread stopped being a side note and became the entire story.
The history, the knowledge, the craftsmanship, the biology. And at the center of it all — the levain. A living organism that has to be fed every single day so that, in return, it will feed you. That idea — that reciprocal relationship between the baker and something alive — became an obsession I haven't recovered from since.
We started our mother starter in 2013. The first loaves were dense, humbling, and entirely ours.
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By 2015, the idea had become a brand. Bread and Salt was ready to meet the world, and the world in question was Souk el Tayeb — Beirut's beloved farmers market. Getting in was its own challenge. There was already bread at the market. What we had to convince the organizers was that what we made was something categorically different.
It took follow-up calls and patient explanations, but we got our table.
The reactions that first day told us everything about where we were starting from. Some customers heard "sourdough" and thought we were saying Sour Dough — bread from the Tyre. Others couldn't understand how bread could rise without commercial yeast. A few Lebanese who had lived abroad recognized us immediately and approached the stand with the particular joy of finding something familiar in an unexpected place.
But the ones who tasted it — they understood without needing an explanation.
That taste. The depth of fermentation, the crust, the crumb, the way it stays with you. It doesn't need a pitch. It speaks for itself, and it always has.
In 2017 we opened the cafe on Charles Malek Avenue in Ashrafieh. A physical home for everything we had been building.
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Then Lebanon did what Lebanon does.
2019 brought the revolution. 2020 brought a pandemic. On August 4th, 2020, the port of Beirut exploded.
Our house was damaged. The bakery was damaged. Our car was gone. Carole and I were both injured. We spent weeks healing.
We closed for two days.
On the third day, bread was back on the shelves.
I don't say that to perform resilience. I say it because it's simply what happened, and because the starter needed feeding regardless of what the city looked like outside. The levain doesn't pause for catastrophe. Neither did we.
The economic collapse followed. Then another war. Then another.
Through all of it — the empty streets, the generator-dependent ovens, the currency that dissolved, the mornings when we didn't know if anyone would come — the bread kept being made the same way. Same starter. Same process. Same ingredients. No shortcuts introduced because times were hard. No commercial yeast quietly added to speed things up when speed would have helped.
Some standards aren't negotiable. That's the whole point of having them.
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Bread and Salt is not a business we built to sell one day. It is not a concept or a brand exercise or a trend we caught at the right moment.
It is, as Carole and I have come to understand it, something closer to a child — nursed into existence in difficult conditions, with modest means and no safety net, and loved with the particular intensity that comes from choosing something not because you need it for money but because you need it for yourself.
The food we make is the food we eat. We are picky eaters. That has never changed.
Eleven years since the first starter. Ten years since the first loaf reached a stranger's hands at a farmers market. Everything Lebanon has thrown at us in between.
The bread is still the same.
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Bread and Salt Sourdough Cafe — Ashrafieh, Beirut. Open Monday to Saturday, 8:30am to 4pm. Find us on Charles Malek Avenue or order through Toters.
