Ilili

ENAR

“Justice prevails in the end whether here or in the afterlife,” says Philippe Massoud, recalling the assassination of his father George in 1986, during the Lebanese civil war. Over coffee with his older brother Alex at Ilili, their upscale and trendy Lebanese contemporary restaurant in the Flatiron neighborhood in Manhattan, Philippe goes over his turbulent life path from an upbringing at the Coral Beach Hotel during the war to becoming a top-line New York restaurateur. “They were trying to segregate Beirut between Christians and Muslims; we were a Christian family living on the Muslim side,” says Philippe, as he explains why he spent most of his childhood in the kitchen of the Coral Beach Hotel, built in 1964 by his father and family. By the age of eight, Philippe was already making culinary comments to the chefs on what ingredients were missing in a meal. His father never wanted him