Foam and fortune

If you fancy an evening of Lebanese food, implores Karim Haïdar, do not book a table at his newly opened restaurant, Zabad.  “Please,” he says, “go to Karam [Al Bahr, a close neighbor at the Zaitunay Bay restaurant complex], because if you come here you’ll be disappointed.” Given Zabad’s tagline “Lebanese Cuisine by Karim Haïdar”, this might seem counterintuitive. But it is a serious attempt to prepare his audience for what many will see as an unorthodox dining experience.  A traditional Lebanese table invariably calls for blizzards of mezze, steaming mountains of main dishes, pagodas of fresh fruit and platters of sweetmeats — even if half of it gets thrown away. But at Zabad, you will consume a finely-orchestrated procession of seven small savoury dishes and two sweet, from a set tasting menu that changes every few days and name-checks a raft of well-known Lebanese ingredients — tahini, moghrabiyyé, kafta