Kareem Shuhaibar's Voice Note Recipes, Pep Talks From Mum, And A Cultural Capital

Cooking

With cooking, I think it really is a burst of creativity for me in the kitchen. What I especially love is cooking classic recipes from my mother, grandmother and family, but always trying to find a modern take, twist or technique that takes the dish somewhere different without losing the essence of the original recipe.

That’s a lot of fun for me, and it’s something I like to apply elsewhere in advertising and creativity as well. In the kitchen, trying to add those touches and twists while still keeping something classic is a challenge I really enjoy. I love setting myself the challenge of finding a new way to modernise or reinterpret a classic Lebanese dish.

Another source of creativity is craft. I like to use that word in relation to cooking because, especially with Lebanese food, there is so much craft, attention to detail and meticulous preparation involved.

Take tabbouleh, the national salad of Lebanon. The level of intricate preparation required is almost a ritual. You slice the parsley and mint once, very finely, making sure not to overcut them so you don’t oxidise or bruise the herbs. There is so much respect for the ingredients and for detail.

You drain the liquid from the diced tomatoes and then repurpose it by adding cracked wheat, so the wheat absorbs the tomato liquid. Nothing is lost. Everything is recirculated. Everything has a purpose.

There’s a kind of poetry in the making of my cuisine, and I get lost in the romance of those details.

You soften the onions in the tabbouleh by adding cinnamon and seven spices and massaging them into the diced onions to make them less pungent and soften their aroma.

At the end, you add the lemon juice first as the dressing to keep the greens bright in colour, because that’s what citric acid does. Then you add the olive oil later. A lot of people make the mistake of adding olive oil first or at the same time, but olive oil acts like glue. It seals the herbs and stops them absorbing the citric acid properly.

It’s incredible to think our ancestors already understood all of these details for a reason. Everything has a reason and a purpose.

I think that really inspires my creativity in my job. Just by making a salad at home, imagine that.

My Mother

She’s my role model, which is why I dedicated my entire cooking page, The Voice Note Chef, to her. It’s a thank you for everything she’s done.

She raised four sons on her own after losing her husband to cancer and put us all through university. She even got me into George Washington University in America.

They initially rejected my application because my SAT score wasn’t good enough, so she called the dean of admissions from Lebanon and charmed him for 45 minutes. She got him to reconsider me on the condition that I write a letter of appeal.

I wrote the letter, putting my heart into all the reasons why I should attend the university, and I ended up getting in. I graduated with honours and made the Dean’s List.

It’s testament to my mum believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. It’s incredible to have a cheerleader like that in my life. I still call her for pep talks today, 15 years into my career.

She inspires my creativity because I never take no for an answer. I never accept things at face value and I never give up. I pester clients, partners and creatives because I know they’re capable of greatness.

Sometimes it takes someone asking you twice rather than simply accepting the status quo, because that’s how you show you really care.

Beirut

I consider myself very grateful and lucky to come from a country like Lebanon and a city like Beirut, which is 5,000 years old and one of the oldest cities in the world.

It’s both a blessing and a curse. A curse because we’ve gone through so much turmoil, political strife, war, heartache, tragedy, adversity and economic crisis. But despite all of that, we are some of the happiest people you’ll ever meet.

There is an incredible optimism and resilience that is very hard to find anywhere else in the world. Resilience is almost our national resource, whether we want that or not. We’re incredible at overcoming adversity and turning it into something beautiful.

Out of the ashes of the port blast, we built art and monuments from the rubble and the pieces that were blown up. We turned that into art, monuments and a celebration of life. We never let people dim our light.

That explains why Beirut is a food capital, a nightlife capital, a cultural capital, a place of art, music and life. It’s where life lives.

What I also love about Lebanon is the contradictions. You’ll find a church in front of a mosque. You’ll find people leaving a nightclub at five in the morning while the call to prayer sounds over the beats of house music. You’ll find classic Arabic restaurants opposite fast-food burger places. Old and new, young and old. Bullet-ridden villas with terracotta roofs in front of five-star hotels.

There is so much beauty in those contrasts. In the blazing heat of summer, you can still see snow-capped mountains on the horizon from the city.

Contrasts and contradictions are in my DNA. They’re in my culture, and I think that fuels my creativity as well.