On Tender Meat and Good Internet

Yesterday I had lunch in the Hard Rock café in Ein el Mreissé. I was seduced by the photo they had on their menu of the hickory-smoked pulled lamb sandwich which looked a bit like this:

When I was in the US, I had some really good sandwiches made of smoked and shredded meat (here’s a photo I took of one). I had developed an interest in this carnivorous delight after watching a show on the Food Network that explained how it’s made. The meat is spiced, salted, tenderized, rested, and then smoked in special ovens for hours and hours. After 20 to 30 hours (yes that long) of continuous smoking and slow cooking, we get meat so soft, juicy and succulent that it can be easily pulled appart by hand. It’s crispy on the outside and pink-tender on the inside, and so flavorful that no additional ingredient is needed in the sandwich.

Fast forward to yesterday at Beirut’s Hard Rock Café. The sandwich looked good, but it was God-awful. The meat was so hard and the flavor so flat that I easily imagined the shortcut they took to make it: They must have pressure-cooked a piece of lamb for a few minutes, shredded it appart using a food processor, and then threw in some barbecue sauce to add juiciness and a pretense of smokiness.

As I was fighting with my iPhone all day (and failing) for a scrap of 3G internet connectivity, I couldn’t get Hard Rock Café’s sandwich out of my mind. When someone gets used to the taste of fast, cheap and ubiquitous internet, it becomes very difficult to swallow the shit-sandwich the Lebanese government is trying to sell us as a decent internet connection. And it seems people are just getting used to it. I feel really bad for people who never tasted a truly magnificent shredded lamb sandwich, and who actually believe that the one at Hard Rock café is not so bad..

I’m not here to make facile theories about how the crappy but photogenic sandwich at Hard Rock Café is an allegory for Lebanon’s obsession with superficial but insubstantial beauty. All I’m saying is that the internet in Lebanon is so crappy that I somehow felt compelled to write a blog post comparing Lebanon’s internet to a bad shredded lamb sandwich…