Strength in numbers

By the end of 2016, Lebanon will have eight new hospitality venue clusters. These are large spaces with many outlets rented out to different tenants by the projects’ developers, who own and manage the entire space. This seemingly sudden surge in such projects raises some questions concerning the reasons behind their boom, how they work, the merits and disadvantages of being tenants in hospitality clusters and — since four of the projects under development are in Dbayeh, north of Beirut — how much can one area hold? Restaurant Clusters: The past, the present and the future  Beirut’s first model of such a cluster was the string of bars on Uruguay Street, all in a single building project developed by Venture Hospitality, a hospitality concepts development and consulting company, and rented out to various figures in the nightlife business back in 2011. Recalling this experience, Marwan Ayoub, one of the two partners at