The Asterisk Next to Raw Kibbeh Is Missouri Law: Lebanese Food in St. Louis and What to Order

Revised November 9, 2026

A plate of raw minced meat slides past your elbow at a St. Louis Lebanese table, glossy under a thread of olive oil, mint leaves on top, a heap of raw onion on the side. Nobody at the next table flinches. They ordered it on purpose. Meanwhile your own table is frozen over a menu that runs for pages, and half the words on it have never been said out loud.

That plate is kibbeh nayyeh. Find it on the menu and look just past the name: there should be a small asterisk, and a footnote at the bottom of the page. That little star is the law talking. Section 3-603.11 of the Missouri Food Code says a kitchen serving beef, lamb or any animal food raw has to tell you in writing, and the reminder works by asterisking the dish to a footnote along the lines of “Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish, or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness.” No star, no footnote, no table card? Ask before you order.

The rest of the menu is easier than it looks. A Lebanese menu isn’t a list of entrees. It’s a box of parts, and you build the meal in waves. For two people, use the 2-1-1: two cold mezze, one hot, one grill, everything split, pita torn by hand. And if you want to taste those parts made by people who grew up on them, St. Louis has a street literally named Lebanon. At St. Raymond Maronite Cathedral, 931 Lebanon Drive, the parish runs a Wednesday Luncheon of Lebanese and Middle Eastern food; check the parish’s posted kitchen closing dates before you drive, or call the cathedral at 314-621-0056. Over one September weekend, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, the same cathedral hosts the St. Louis Lebanese Festival, a party nearly six decades old, with kibbe aras, tabbouli, meat pies, spinach pies, cabbage rolls and stuffed grape leaves on the menu, dabke by the cathedral’s youth dancers, and free admission and free parking. The flyer and food pre-order go up on the cathedral’s own site, straymond-mc.org, ahead of the weekend.

What dishes are typically on a Lebanese menu in St. Louis?

Expect cold mezze like hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh and labneh with warm pita, plus hot mezze like kibbeh and falafel. Then come grills such as shish tawook and kafta with garlic toum, shawarma, and sweets like baklava and knafeh. Order to share: a few cold plates, one or two hot ones, one grill.

Cold plates land first, with a basket of thin pita that doubles as your fork, and they sit happily on the table while everyone talks. Hot plates follow. The grilled meat arrives when the table is already a little too full, and somehow there’s still room. In Lebanon, a traditional mezze table can run to dozens of small dishes and last for hours, with arak, an anise spirit that turns cloudy when water hits it, poured slowly alongside. You don’t need dozens. Five or six plates for four people is a strong start.

The one line to look for before you order raw kibbeh

Kibbeh nayyeh is minced raw meat worked with fine bulgur and served with olive oil, mint and raw onion. It’s traditional, it’s cold, it tastes clean and green and a little peppery, and it’s exactly what that food-code section has in mind. Under the Missouri Food Code, the written notice can be a menu advisory, a table tent, a placard, a brochure or a label, and the dish itself gets the asterisk. So scan the bottom of the menu and the little card by the napkins. Here’s the part worth knowing: one of the three footnotes the code allows reads “Regarding the safety of these items, written information is available upon request.” See that line? You’re entitled to ask for the written information, so ask. Still can’t find it? Ask the server two things: is it beef or lamb, and when was it ground? A kitchen proud of its nayyeh answers both without a pause. I could not confirm the exact wording any St. Louis restaurant prints, and the city and county write their own food rules on top of the state’s. Curious what St. Louis County’s own Food Code says about raw dishes?

What a Missouri home kitchen can and can’t sell you

A tin of maamoul from a neighbor’s oven, powdered sugar on your fingers before the lid is all the way off: that one you can legally buy. Under Missouri’s Cottage Law (RSMo 196.298), home kitchens may sell baked goods, canned jams and jellies, and dried herb mixes, per the state health department’s home-based food guidance. Cooked dishes aren’t on the list. So the neighbor who bakes maamoul or baklava for the holidays can legally sell you a box, even online when seller and buyer are both in Missouri. The neighbor whose hummus or kibbeh is the stuff of legend can’t sell it from a home kitchen under that law. Which is why the best baklava of your life might come from a neighbor’s kitchen, while the best kibbeh still comes from a licensed one. Check the state’s current limits before you buy or sell.

Ordering for two

Call it the 2-1-1: two cold mezze, one hot, one grill, everything split. Hummus and tabbouleh open well, one rich and creamy, the other so sharp with lemon it makes your jaw tingle. Add kibbeh or falafel for crunch, and eat it while it still hisses. Then share shish tawook or a mixed grill, which often comes with rice, grilled tomato and onion, and a cup of garlic sauce. Still hungry afterward? Order dessert, not another dip.

Ordering for a group

Groups get the best version of this food. With six or eight people you can order a real spread: three or four cold mezze, three hot ones, a mixed grill or two, a stack of extra bread. Plenty of Lebanese kitchens offer a mezze sampler or a family-style feast, and asking the server to “bring us a good spread” is a normal request, not a lazy one. A birthday table that drove in from Sullivan can let the kitchen run the whole show and never open the menu twice. Same logic on Lebanon Drive at festival time: one person in the food line, one holding the picnic table, and nobody eats until the kibbeh lands.

Order in rounds, though. Fried kibbeh sounds different at minute two than at minute twenty: crackle, then nothing. Cold dips hold up fine, so add hot plates as the first ones disappear instead of flooding the table at once.

Cold mezze: the plates that hit the table first

The pita is warm, the plates are cool, and the first bite is nearly all lemon. These are the typical Lebanese mezze dishes: hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, fattoush, labneh and stuffed grape leaves called warak enab. Most are vegetarian, all lean on lemon, garlic, olive oil, tahini, parsley and mint, and every one gets scooped up with pita. They double as the popular Lebanese appetizers, though at a Lebanese table they’re less a warm-up than the main event.

Hummus

Forget the grocery-store tub. Lebanese hummus is chickpeas whipped very smooth with tahini, lemon and garlic, spread in a shallow bowl with a well of olive oil in the center and a dusting of paprika or sumac. Some menus list hummus with meat, topped with sizzling ground lamb or beef and toasted pine nuts. See it? Get it.

Baba ghanoush

Eggplant gets charred over open flame until the skin blackens and the inside collapses, then it’s mashed with tahini, lemon and garlic. The smoke is the point. Names drift from kitchen to kitchen, and some menus call the tahini version mutabbal and save “baba ghanoush” for a chunkier eggplant salad with tomato and pepper. Unsure which is coming? Ask.

Tabbouleh

First-timers get a surprise: real Lebanese tabbouleh is a parsley salad, not a grain salad. Finely chopped flat-leaf parsley does the work, with mint, tomato, onion, a small handful of fine bulgur, lemon juice and olive oil. It should taste green, bright and a little sour. A bowl that looks mostly like bulgur is somebody else’s version.

Fattoush

The salad for people who want crunch. Lettuce, cucumber, tomato, radish and herbs get tossed with toasted or fried pita pieces and a dressing sharpened with sumac, a tart deep-red spice, and sometimes pomegranate molasses. It began as a way to use up yesterday’s bread. Now people fight over the last forkful.

Labneh

Yogurt strained until it spreads, somewhere between Greek yogurt and cream cheese. It comes swirled on a plate under olive oil, often with dried mint or za’atar. Tangy and cool, it’s the plate you keep dragging bread through after the grills arrive, because it calms the garlic down.

Warak enab

Grape leaves rolled tight around a filling and simmered. The cold vegetarian kind holds rice, tomato, parsley and onion and is cooked with lemon and olive oil, so each roll comes out soft and tart. Hot versions filled with rice and ground meat exist too, and they usually sit on the hot side of the menu or arrive as a main.

Which hot mezze should you order?

Listen for the crackle: that’s kibbeh or falafel leaving the oil. Hot mezze are the fried, baked and grilled small plates, falafel, kibbeh, fatayer, sambousek and arayes, and they’re the crunchy half of the table. If you order only one, make it kibbeh.

Falafel

Lebanese falafel is usually made from soaked, uncooked chickpeas, sometimes with fava beans, ground with herbs, onion, garlic and spices and deep-fried. The outside should crackle. The inside should be green-flecked and tender, never dry. It arrives with tahini sauce and pickles, and rolled into pita with tomato and parsley it makes a sandwich worth the trip.

Kibbeh

More forms than anything else on the page. The fried kind is a football-shaped shell of bulgur and finely ground meat, stuffed with more spiced meat, onion and pine nuts, then fried dark and crisp. It can also be pressed into a tray, scored into diamonds and baked. Then there’s the raw kind, kibbeh nayyeh, which is why the county note near the top matters.

Fatayer and sambousek

Fatayer are small baked pies folded into triangles. Spinach is the classic, filled with spinach, onion, lemon and sumac so it bites back with a pleasant sourness; cheese and meat versions are common. Sambousek are their crispier cousins, half-moon pastries, usually fried, filled with spiced meat and pine nuts or salty white cheese. Both travel well, which is why trays of them turn up at so many family parties.

Arayes

Maybe the most underrated plate on the menu. Pita is stuffed with a thin layer of seasoned ground meat, the same mix used for kafta, then grilled or pressed until the bread crisps and the juices soak through. Cut into wedges. Dip in labneh. Repeat until someone stops you.

What belongs on a grill order?

Char and garlic reach you before the plate does. The grill section is where the skewers live: shish tawook, kafta and lamb. A mixed grill gives you some of each, which makes it the smartest first-visit order, and it usually arrives with some mix of rice, grilled tomato and onion, pickles, pita and garlic sauce, depending on the kitchen.

Shish tawook

Chicken cubes marinated in yogurt, lemon, garlic and spices, sometimes with a spoonful of tomato paste, then skewered and grilled. The yogurt keeps the meat tender while the edges char. It’s the safe order that doesn’t taste safe, and one swipe through garlic sauce explains why regulars rarely order anything else.

Kafta and lamb

Kafta is ground beef, lamb or a blend, worked with chopped parsley, onion and warm spices, pressed onto flat skewers and grilled. Juicy and herby, and the same mixture that fills arayes. Some kitchens also bake it in a tray with sliced potatoes and tomato sauce, a homestyle dish worth grabbing off the specials board. Lamb skewers, chops or a slow-cooked special may appear too; lamb is the meat Lebanese cooking has leaned on for generations, often seasoned simply. Cuts and portions vary, so ask how it’s cooked.

Toum, the garlic sauce

Garlic, oil, lemon juice and salt, whipped until it turns white and fluffy, a bit like mayonnaise with no egg in it. Fierce. Take too big a swipe and your eyes water, yet people ask for extra cups to carry home, and in a humid St. Louis summer the smell rides in the car with them all the way. Don’t plan a first date around it.

Shawarma, and what a Lebanese platter really is

Shawarma is marinated meat stacked on a vertical spit, roasted slowly as it turns and shaved off in thin slices. Chicken shawarma usually comes with toum and pickles, while beef or lamb tends to get tahini sauce, onion and parsley. Wrapped in pita it’s a sandwich: a tight roll, pickles tucked inside, sometimes pressed on the grill so the outside crisps and the paper goes translucent with grease. That’s lunch. Piled on a plate, it’s dinner.

What’s actually on the platter?

A Lebanese platter, sometimes called a plate or a combo, is a whole meal on one dish. Most pair a protein, such as shawarma, shish tawook, kafta or falafel, with rice, a salad, hummus or garlic sauce, and pita. The rice is often cooked with toasted vermicelli, a home-kitchen staple that gives it a nutty flavor. What lands on the plate changes from kitchen to kitchen, so read the description or just ask.

Platters make sense when you’re eating alone or the table can’t agree on anything. Everybody gets a little of everything. Nobody has to share.

What do Lebanese people eat for breakfast?

Manakish, a lot of the time, still warm and smelling of thyme. It’s a round flatbread baked with a topping, and the classic is za’atar: wild thyme, sumac, toasted sesame and salt stirred into olive oil and spread over the dough. Cheese manakish, often made with a mild white cheese called akkawi, runs a close second.

Many Lebanese families eat it in the morning, folded around tomato, cucumber, fresh mint and olives, with a glass of hot tea. Some bakers make a half-and-half, za’atar on one side and cheese on the other, so nobody has to choose. Kishk, a fermented mix of yogurt and bulgur, makes another topping with a sour, funky edge. Worth trying once.

Foul, warm fava beans with lemon, garlic and olive oil, is another breakfast classic, scooped up with bread beside labneh and olives. Around St. Louis, manakish mostly turns up at Lebanese bakeries and at restaurants that open early. Go in the morning. Fresh bread doesn’t always last until lunch.

Which Lebanese dishes work for vegetarians?

More than in most cuisines. The cold mezze are nearly all vegetarian, and hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, fattoush, labneh and cold warak enab make a full meal on their own. Add falafel, spinach fatayer, cheese sambousek and mujaddara, lentils cooked with rice or bulgur under a heap of deeply browned onions, and nobody misses the grill.

There’s a reason the meatless side runs so deep. Lebanon has large Christian communities with long lenten fasting traditions, and generations of cooks built a repertoire cooked in olive oil with no meat at all. Batata harra belongs on that list: cubed potatoes fried, then tossed with garlic, cilantro, lemon and chili. Crispy, spicy, gone in minutes.

Vegans do well too, since so many plates skip dairy. Double-check anyway. Labneh is dairy, some pastries use butter, rice may be cooked in chicken stock, and falafel might share a fryer with meat. One quick question settles it, and our guide to how to eat out as a vegetarian in St. Louis covers how to ask without making it awkward.

Craving something that isn’t garlic? Here’s how to order Irish food without guessing.

Lebanese or Greek: how can you tell on a Mediterranean menu?

They share a sea and some ingredients, but the flavors part ways fast. Greek cooking reaches for oregano, feta, yogurt-and-cucumber tzatziki and lemon potatoes. Lebanese cooking reaches for tahini, sumac, za’atar, parsley, pomegranate molasses and garlic toum. A menu labeled “Mediterranean” often mixes both, so it helps to know which side a dish came from.

The gyro and the shawarma make a handy test. In the U.S., a gyro usually means slices off a cone of seasoned ground meat, tucked into thick, fluffy pita with tzatziki, tomato and onion. Shawarma is stacked slices of marinated whole meat in thinner bread, with toum or tahini where the tzatziki would be. Salads split the same way: Greek salad is chunky tomato, cucumber, olives and a slab of feta, while fattoush brings toasted pita and sumac.

Desserts drift apart too. Baklava lives on both sides, but Lebanese versions tend to favor pistachios and a syrup perfumed with orange blossom or rose water, while Greek versions often use walnuts, cinnamon and honey. For the Greek half of the menu, see our local’s guide to Greek and Mediterranean food in St. Louis. Notice some overlap with Armenian cooking? You’re not imagining it, and what Armenian food is and what to order in St. Louis shows how neighboring kitchens trade dishes back and forth.

Sweets worth saving room for

Syrup on the fingers, pistachio crumbs on the napkin. Baklava is paper-thin pastry layered with chopped nuts and soaked in fragrant syrup. Knafeh is warm, stretchy cheese under a crust of shredded pastry or semolina, drenched in syrup. Maamoul are crumbly cookies filled with dates or nuts, often baked for Easter and Eid.

Knafeh

Order it hot. Soft white cheese goes under shredded pastry or a semolina crust, the pan bakes until golden, and then it’s soaked in syrup and showered with crushed pistachios. Salty, sweet, gooey. In Lebanon it’s eaten at breakfast too, stuffed into a sesame bread roll. Yes, really.

Maamoul

Maamoul get pressed in carved wooden molds, so each cookie carries a pattern that often hints at the filling, dates in one shape and nuts in another. Buttery, crumbly, not too sweet. Bakeries often sell them by the box around the holidays, and a holiday box from a neighbor’s oven fits the Cottage Law rule covered near the top: baked goods in, cooked dishes out.

Close with Lebanese coffee, thick and strong and often scented with cardamom. Or mint tea, if you’d like to sleep tonight.

Frequently asked questions about ordering Lebanese food

What to order at Lebanese restaurant?

Start with hummus and tabbouleh, add kibbeh or falafel, then share one grill with garlic toum on the side. Use the 2-1-1: two cold, one hot, one grill, split. Order in rounds so fried plates stay hot. Order raw kibbeh only after finding the menu’s raw-food note or asking, and save room for knafeh.

What is the most famous Lebanese food?

Outside Lebanon, hummus is probably the best known, with tabbouleh, falafel and shawarma close behind. Inside the country, many people point to kibbeh, a mix of bulgur and ground meat that’s fried, baked or eaten raw, as the national dish. Tabbouleh gets plenty of votes too, since it appears on nearly every Lebanese table.

What are some typical Lebanese mezze dishes?

Cold: hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, fattoush, labneh and warak enab, the stuffed grape leaves. Hot: falafel, kibbeh, fatayer, sambousek, arayes and batata harra, the spicy garlic potatoes. Olives, pickled turnips, raw vegetables and warm pita fill the gaps between plates, and the whole spread is meant to be shared and eaten slowly.

What is a Lebanese platter?

A Lebanese platter is a full meal on one plate: a protein such as shawarma, shish tawook, kafta or falafel, plus rice, a salad, hummus or garlic sauce, and pita. The rice is often cooked with toasted vermicelli. Contents change from kitchen to kitchen, so read the menu description or ask before you order.

What is traditional Arabic mezze?

Mezze is a spread of small shared dishes served together at the start of a meal, or as the whole meal, across Lebanon and much of the Arab world. It mixes dips, salads, pickles, pastries and fried bites, all eaten slowly with bread. In Lebanon it’s often paired with arak, an anise spirit mixed with water.

What are some good Lebanese dishes for a dinner party?

Choose dishes that hold up on a buffet. Hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh and fattoush can be made ahead, with the fattoush bread added last so it stays crisp. Baked kibbeh, spinach fatayer and a tray of shish tawook or kafta skewers cover the hot side, and baklava or maamoul make an easy dessert.

What are the top 5 Lebanese dishes?

Ask five Lebanese cooks and you’ll get five lists, but these come up again and again: kibbeh, tabbouleh, hummus, shish tawook and manakish. Plenty of people would add fattoush, shawarma or knafeh. For a first visit, order the first three as mezze and the tawook as your grill, and you cover a lot of ground.

About the Author: The St Louis Near Me Directory Team
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.

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