Behind the relic-festooned bar in his pub off Sadat Street, Andre Toriz gives off the vague impression of having weathered hard times. As the youngest son of Georges Toriz, the founding manager of Captain’s Cabin, Andre has been living in the world of Hamra nightlife since before he could see over a bar. His father opened the Cabin in 1964 with a group of American pilots – among them, his uncle Kyle Earl Mitchell – who had come to Lebanon to help set up the new Middle East Airlines. Andre took over when his father passed away in 1997 and nowadays, his he is fixated on the task of protecting his inheritance: a yellow paint and wood-panel dive that was once one of the classiest and busiest joints in Hamra.
A few blocks down from the Cabin on Makdessi Street, Sami Serhal runs Rock Inn, one of the few places in Hamra that is older than the Cabin. The bar still has the same Mod-meets-Flintstones interior it had in 1959, but while it used to be a standard pub, it is now one of the many places in Hamra where drinks are accompanied by the “entertainment” of women on staff.
One of Sami’s occasional customers is Amigo, the manager of Evergreen, a tiny pub on Abdel Aziz Street, which is packed to the gills with precious junk and wall-papered with messages scrawled over the years by patrons in varying states of inebriation.
Farther to the west of the neighborhood, Abou Elie runs his legendary communist bar in a non-descript cement strip mall. Abou Elie at one time maintained strict control over entry into his watering hole, a place where Souha Bechara and Okomono both sipped beers at one time or another amid a mess of posters of Kamal Jumblatt, Mao and Che Guevara.
The original nightlife
Andre, Sami, Amigo and Abou Elie – four totally different people with four very different establishments – belong to the odd-ball world of Hamra nightlife.
Spurred on by the booming tourism industry, the nightlife scene began to take root in Hamra in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “It was so much tourists back then,” said Rock Inn’s Sami. “Hamra was a great place [for tourists]. You had AUB and AUH, and the airport is over there… There were a lot of foreign companies, too… So, everybody from the outside and from the Arab world, they all came to Hamra.”
That is why the nightlife boom happened in the early seventies, he said, because “everyone was trying to make business [from tourism] and there was money in [nightlife].”
Back then, Sami said, “I had no Arabic customers. It was all English, Italian and French.” And over at Captain’s Cabin, “It was full every night, mostly of foreigners who lived here and who had plans to live here forever,” said Andre.
Henri I. Allam, the owner of another 1960s era nightspot, American Dream, said there was demand for nightlife among Lebanese people, too. “My place was a stereo club, a disco, back then. It was mostly Lebanese – mostly couples. The downstairs place was just for dancing… all kinds of dancing: Ta’esh Fa’esh, rock and roll, the Beatles, French music.”
Andre recalled that there were at least six or seven other nightspots of the block over form Captain’s Cabin in the 1970s. “They had great names, too, like Underwater Bar and Black and White.”
The scene at the Cabin was more formal than it is today. They served food – hamburgers and New York strip steaks cooked up by a retired pilot – on big rectangular tables covered in signature Captain’s Cabin tablecloths and had a staff of 16, eight people per shift.
Amigo remembers going in the early 1970s to places like The Duke of Wellington, the “British” bar in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel that now hosts the popular Friday night happy hour. As he remembers it, “All the places back then were like pubs – they had draft beer and games sometimes.”
Sami said: “People used to come for a drink; they’d take their wives, their daughters.” At Rock Inn, “We had music and things… I started doing magic tricks sometimes… I can’t do it now because we have girls now, and I don’t want the customers looking at me and forgetting the girls.”
The war years
Sami saw the face of Hamra nightlife change a number of times, but never more so than when the civil war broke out. “People started to run away from this area in ‘75, when the war started. Shway, Shway,” he said. His own cousin, for example, who owned Rock Inn, decided to leave Beirut for his home village in Amchit, leaving Sami with the keys to bar.
With tourism down and increasingly less income coming in, a lot of places shut down. Captain’s Cabin’s sister-restaurant, the Neptune Room, was forced to shut down because “gangsters and, you know, militiamen were taking food and drinks and demanding it for free,” said Andre.
Sami, for his part, stayed put and kept Rock Inn open throughout the war. “There was no business during these years, but I had to stay open just so that they wouldn’t take my place,” he said. In 1983, he was kidnapped: “I was here [at Rock Inn]. I was standing outside the door; it was about 6:00 in the evening. People came with three guns, and they took me.”
“I’m lucky to be alive right now, because I saw what they did to other people that were there where I was.”
The purpose behind the kidnapping, Sami insisted, was to force him to leave Rock Inn and his home. “They took too many places, too many houses and too many places. That’s why they came here and kidnapped me – because they wanted to take it.”
Allam, the owner of American Dream, did leave his bar in 1975, and when he returned in 1991, he learned that a Palestinian man had been running the place with his wife throughout most of the war. “I left it, and they came,” he said matter-of-factly.
Captain’s Cabin also stayed open throughout the war. Andre remembers the daily trip from school to meet his father at the Cabin, waking, or driving with a man hired by his father to protect him and his siblings.
Describing the clientele at the Cabin during this period, Andre said furtively: “When it’s good times, good people come; when its hard times, different kind of people come.”
By 1984, after “West Beirut turned against the army,” he said, “there were no bars, no drinks. We had to remove all the drinks from [Captain’s Cabin].”
“It was chaos here… like a no man’s land,” he said, recalling one story in particular about an argument that began when a customer who wanted to pay on credit was refused by the bartender. The bartender watched the customer leave in a rage and soon after was told by another regular customer that he was on his way back – armed. The bartender escaped by jumping over the garden wall, but from the next-door garden, he could hear the irate customer, who had come with two other armed men, shouting furiously. The three eventually left without hurting anyone, though they did drink a lot more.
In 1986, the Syrians came into West Beirut and closed the roads near Captain’s Cabin for 19 years. “But anyway,” he said. “There are a lot of places like [Captain’s Cabin] that stopped… If [a bar as old as this] goes to the Tourism Ministry, they’ll be surprised, like ‘What?? You’re extinct!”
Things started looking up for Andre and other business owners in Hamra once the reconstruction project began in 1996. Ironically, at the same time, new areas began attracting nightlife crowds; first Monot Street and then more recently Gemmayzeh. But a new pubs and restaurants are opening at this very moment and many think that Hamra will soon see a renaissance of sorts. And in any case, as one pub-goer put it: “Hamra is Hamra. It doesn’t matter about anything else. It’ll always be there and be great.”
Cheers to that.
