While Lebanon is a great place to party Hamra Street is still generally considered the best of the best. And this every understandable when you come to visit.
When the sun goes down and Beirut starts to cool down Hamra Street starts to heat up. So how does one embrace the Hamra nightlife scene?
What the Hamra Street?
Famous as the place for the cool kids hang out, technically it is but a street. Said street has multipack ding options., street food and stores that go on all night, as well as other fun things round and about.
This includes high confrontation of bars, few of which are actually in Hamra, but around the parallel streets to the place.
Hamra is a night and day place…
When you visit Hamra Street in the daytime you will notice bugger all people doing anything, well at least in the summer. This is because this place gets bloody hot, therefore like other Arab countries, its all about the nightlife.
Things get going therefore just as the sun goes down, with many establishments being very late, or all night.
Bars stay open usually until at 3 am, while the Hamra Street Food, or rather fast-food often goes on all night.
Eating on Hamra Street
The best restaurants on Hamra street are thankfully all on Hamra Street filling probably about a third of the street. Generally speaking these are all Lebanese cuisine, with a smattering of others such as an obligatory Chinese restaurant.
There are also 24 joints that serve stuff like shawarma , burgers and ice-cream cocktails, as well as coffee joints, more fine dining establishments. And fo course there are shisha’s galore if that happens to be your thing.
During the day time the main things that run are small shops thats sell tea and coffee in local paper cup form that cost pretty much nothing.
The Hamra Street Nightlife
Interestingly you cannot get booze on Hamra Street itself (for the most part), but instead on the side streets, where all the bars are. There exceptions to this such as Little Beirut
Conversely most pubs which are off of Hamra Street sell booze, but do not for the most part do food, save free bars snacks. Generally speaking you eat before you drink.
You can read about the best bars on Hamra Street here.
What else is there on Hamra Street?
There are cell phone hops where you can top-up, clothes hops, fashion and of course places to buy magnets. These shops run form the day until late night and are pretty useful.
There other truly useful thing they have on Hamra is money changers as well as people who will give you card advances. Now while this is useful in other countries, it is frankly essential in a place thats economy is screwed.
How do you pay for things on Hmara street?
OK, so as mentioned the economy is crewed here and as such paying for things is hard. In fact it is so hard I will be doing an article just on this point.
The long story short though is not all ATM’s work with foreign cards and you cannot pay by card here. Cash is king on Hamra Street, so make sure you have enough to avoid embarrassment.
Sadly this quite literally happened to me as I ran out of money in bar. I had no currency on me and thankfully was allowed to run. “A tab”. Cash does not have to be in Lebanese Pounds, but also as United States Dollars (USD) which can able be gotten from the few ATM’s that Euros are also well accepted, although at a lesser rate.