Lebanon
Beirut
Booza is pounded, not churned, and stretches like dough. Is it ice cream?
Beirut runs two ice-cream lineages on the same handful of streets. Booza — Levantine ice cream thickened with salep and mastic and pounded by hand in a chilled drum until it stretches like taffy rather than melting — has been made in an unmarked one-room Achrafieh shop since the late 1940s by the family behind Hanna Mitri, whose queue-forming reputation drew the New York Times, the Guardian and Le Figaro without the recipe changing, and which rebuilt after the 2020 port explosion destroyed its original premises. Bachir, the booza house that gave Paris its own Lebanese ice-cream parlour in 2017, began not in Beirut but in nearby Bikfaya in 1936; Lebanon's French-language business press credits the family with building a serious production laboratory inside Beirut itself as early as the late 1970s, specifically to engineer around the city's power cuts and water quality. Alongside the booza houses, a newer wave of Italian-trained gelaterias — led by Orso Bianco, freshly making small batches on Gemmayze's Gouraud Street since 2012 — argues Beirut also takes the churned tradition seriously. All of it has kept operating through a currency collapse and the aftermath of an explosion that leveled the neighborhood where the city's most famous ice cream is made.
Last checked 2026-08-21
The selected spots
2 selected
- 01
Hanna Mitri
booza · Mitri (Hanna) Moussa, son of founder Hanna Mitri Moussa, trained by his father from a young age
It is the single most consistently cited booza address in Lebanese press across a decade of coverage, the shop most often used domestically as the reference point for what 'real' Levantine ice cream is, and its survival through both the 2020 port explosion and the broader economic collapse is independently documented and dated rather than assumed.
- 02
Orso Bianco
gelato · Jocelyne Tchopourian (Gemayel), co-founder and CEO
It is the clearest counter-narrative to Beirut's booza-only reputation: a from-scratch Italian-technique gelateria, founded and still run by the same person, with a named organic-sourcing relationship documented independently rather than claimed only on its own marketing, and enough longevity (since 2012, in the same original location) to be more than a trend shop.
Research notes
City boundary
The municipality of Beirut.