Everything you taste at The Lebanese Bakery comes from the collaboration between its kitchen and community. For six years, chef Clara Bubenzer has swapped recipes, advice and meals with customers in the exploration of Levant cuisine.
It feels as though The Lebanese Bakery has no walls: The seating eases onto the sidewalk, there is no kitchen door, you can pick up pantry items off the shelf yourself while the courtyard’s bougainvillea peeps inside. Although chef Clara Bubenzer, the food mastermind behind this thrumming Cape Town institution, sits planning amongst the customer tables, she has a constant connection with the going-ons of the kitchen. It’s light, bright and open-hearted under their roof.
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(@lebanesebakeryct)Started in 2019, The Lebanese Bakery’s two branches offer up their take on traditional breads, dips and meals. Their falafel is renowned for being crisp yet tender, their hummus as fresh as it gets. Their pantry stocks various key items such as pomegranate molasses, orange blossom water and sumac. They want their food to bring people together, to make memories as they pass dishes and share an experience. Clara experienced this first-hand during her years living in Egypt as well as her eye-opening trips to Lebanon. She can’t wait to return to Beirut and bring more flavours home to her bakeries.
Also read: Roast leg of lamb on muhamarra
Eye-opening Egypt
“I was so young when I lived in Egypt that my focus was on adventure – not necessarily flavour,” reflects Clara with a mischievous smile. “I was 23, sucking the marrow out of crazy travel and desert trips, and enjoying the adrenaline. I was in an expat bubble, too, so I didn’t have anyone to really guide me. I think I collected flavours, but I don’t think that it defined me. My food adventures in the Middle East only came later. It was just so delicious…”
She headed to Egypt with her boyfriend and although that relationship didn’t last, her love affair with Egypt did. She’d just finished three years of cheffing studies at the Granger Bay Hotel School and also spent time in high-end restaurant kitchens. The experience nearly broke her spirit for cooking completely. “I spent my last six months of training in a kitchen where the chefs were treating people really badly. It’s alright to work long days, but when someone is being extremely rude to get people to do stuff… that wasn’t for me. I needed a break.”
In Cairo, she joined Gourmet Egypt – a company that imported and exported speciality foods. She developed their line of products over the next three and a half years and continued to work with them after she returned to South Africa. Back on home soil, Clara continued to do food her way: a restaurant in the Youngblood gallery, a stint with the German deli Hartlief, her own cooking YouTube channel and many years with Jack Black Brewery. In between, she still managed to fly to Cairo every year to develop new products for Gourmet Egypt.
And that connection to Egypt came to have an even bigger influence in her life, almost two decades after she first set foot in the country. “I got a call from an Egyptian number one day and, thinking it was Gourmet Egypt, I picked up. Turns out it was Khaled El-Alfy, who’d heard of me via the operations manager at Gourmet Egypt. He said we know the same people in Cairo, I’m looking to buy the Lebanese Bakery in Cape Town, and would I go and have a look at it for him,” she recalls.
The bakery on Imam Haron Road had good bones, but with some love they could make it something special. And so a partnership was born. The business partners renovated the space in a matter of months to reflect the blue ocean and white rock of Lebanon, with pops of pink to bring in the bougainvillea. “There were a lot of challenges. My dad died in November and my son was born in January. I was put on bed rest for a month, had the baby and was off again – Khaled did a lot of it by himself during that time. And then Covid hit,” she recounts.
They were home for two weeks until Khaled got them an essential service license to bake bread. Slowly but surely, they became their neighbourhood’s trusted local corner shop, with fresh bread, eggs, yeast, sugar, flour, milk – anything Clara could make or source. And that community, built during the worst of times, is still with them now during good times – with two branches. Clara recalls how Mr and Mrs Son, a couple from Hartfield Village, posted about the bakery on Facebook and it spread like wildfire through the neighbourhood. “They really helped us to grow and they’re still our customers, six years later,” she smiles.
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Clara had been to Lebanon numerous times, but it was the lessons of the bakery community that taught her how to really make the cuisine her own. Reem, a Syrian expat, offered to teach Clara how to make all kinds of dishes once a week. Now, Reem and her husband supply the bakery with all of its Syrian products such as tahini and pomegranate molasses. “You’ve got to use the real thing,” believes Clara. “Using their tahini versus someone else’s is like comparing freshly squeezed orange juice to Oros.”
Authentically them
“Beside those lessons with Reem, I read everything I could about Lebanese cuisine so that our bakery can do it justice. Friends and customers bring me books directly from Lebanon and I just devour them,” she enthuses. “Khaled’s mother was a brilliant cook. His sister, Olfat, is also a great cook, so I often phone her to ask for advice and her input on them. Khaled himself has a great palette – he worked on our falafel recipe for two years. And he’s still tinkering!” she laughs.
Another source of input are their customers. “When customers come in and ask for certain dishes, I quickly look it up, try to create it for them and learn in the process,” she laughs. “This place really is a community project.”
But nothing inspires her more than seeing, touching and tasting Lebanon herself. “Oh, it’s just so beautiful. I did a chocolate workshop there and stayed with a friend and her grandparents. I really got to see what they eat every day. Food is very much a shared experience there,” she reflects. “It’s not like in South African restaurants, where everyone orders a separate meal. There, you’ll order many things that seven or eight people will eat from, which I love.
I want the kitchen to be open so that people can see how confident we are in our honesty. I’d like them to come in and experience what Lebanese cuisine could be like, according to us
“Without sounding gooey, I think food is about coming together. And this style of eating gets that. I love that you reach over and make eye contact with someone, someone likes this more than that so the bowl stays on their side of the table. Those details and beautiful moments are what I adore about it.”
“So if you go through our reviews, it gets interesting: Some people say our food is not authentic, some say it is. My response is that we’re in Cape Town – not Lebanon or Syria,” she explains. “There are a few things like our hummus, baba ganoush and mohammara that I’m happy to say are authentic. When I create our recipes, I read and ask widely about it before settling on a recipe that makes sense to me. I don’t think I’m in the position to say what’s authentic and what isn’t, but I’d like to honour the foods as much as I can.”
Many customers validate the food they make, and a particular instance has stayed with Clara. “When we opened our second branch off Harrington Street, Lebanese cookbook author Sophia Lindop stood up and said a really nice speech. She thanked us for carrying on with Lebanese food in South Africa. If I get validation from Sophia Lindop, then I’m fine,” she smiles.
Baking it happen
Lebanese Bakery strives to be a place of well-priced, honest, quality food for its community, says Clara. It’s never easy to keep prices down, but it’s an issue close to her heart, so she’s forever trying to balance quality and price. “I want the kitchen to be open so that people can see how confident we are in our honesty. I’d like them to come in and experience what Lebanese cuisine could be like, according to us,” she explains.
What’s next? “Sustainable growth,” she shares after some thought. “I’d like to see the bakery grow slowly but steadily over the next 30 years. We want to build as the customers’ trust in us grows.”
By: Christi Nortier
Photography by: Clare Gunn, Her Heiness: Getty images
