Situated at the cross-roads of Europe and Asia, the WANA cuisine is a veritable melting-pot of empires past – Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Byzantine, Arab – and to a very minuscule extent, European.

It is a cuisine that predates the modern nation-state construct, one which arbitrarily lays claim to national dishes and distinctive culinary identities as a way of legitimising national identities and colonial independence, despite the profoundly obvious shared lineage outside of these colonially imposed national boundaries. As such, it would be reductionist and flawed to discuss the cuisine as a set of distinct national gastronomic legacies belonging to a specific nation-state rather than through the lens of its shared ancestry.

The WANA cuisine is deeply regional with interdependent culinary lineages that permeate nationalistic borders that hide important micro-distinctions and nuances influenced by rural life, terroir, and micro-localised ingredients, dialects, and traditions. One example is maftoul. Widely considered a Palestinian dish, it is, in fact, also prepared in southern parts of Lebanon which today shares a border with Palestine but no less importantly, a close historical trading relationship.

Bethany’s dishes will tickle the mind and tastebuds with a veritable feast of West Asian and North African favourites generously sprinkled with morsels covering history, geography and more.