Emma Pinch explores the varied cuisine of the Middle East

NESTLED among the carpet shops and tyre fitters on Southport’s Eastbank Street is a Lebanese restaurant.

The couple of times I’d passed the Alamir Bistro, its unassuming frontage and dark interior had piqued my interest. To me, the Lebanon always suggested something green and exotic, but volatile, halfway between Biblical hanging gardens and cracked marble pillars, and burnt-out cars and smashed concrete.

When I’d phoned up to book a table, the lady answering the phone had sounded gratified, if not a little surprised, that I had done so.

Her reaction became clear when, despite it being a Friday and 8pm, we found only one other table occupied.

If the kitchen was a war zone, it wasn’t immediately obvious.

Squeezed into a narrow Victorian terrace, inside the Alamir features mirrors, warm, peachy terracotta walls and bright postcards featuring the Lebanon’s historic splendours.

Its decor blends with the broad smiles of the waitresses and hectic Middle Eastern background music to give a hint of the hot streets of old Beirut. Before the ’70s conflict made its capital city synonymous with destruction, Lebanon was known as the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Paris of the Arab world, with influences from everywhere.

Food from the country is healthy and it shares many dishes with nearby Mediterranean countries like Israel, Turkey and Greece, based around tomatoes, onion and garlic, aubergine, chick peas and sesame and lashings of olive oil. Lebanese cooking doesn't boast a vast repertoire of sauces, rather it focuses on herbs, spices and the freshness of ingredients and mixing them in various combinations.

One of the most common specialities is mezza, the Lebanese version of Greek mezze. In Alamir, you can taste a good many of these in different quantities, thanks to its set meal menu combinations, which are at first a touch baffling – but we soon got the hang of them.

We opted for three starter mezza between us, served with warmed pitta, then a main – barbecued lamb chunks with tahini and parsley – and dessert.

Choosing mezza was next to impossible; everything appears mouthwatering. In the end we went for Lebanese pizza – because try as I might I can never pass up anything on a menu with that p-word in it – sausages and moussaka.

The pizza turned out to be small pitta bread pieces topped with a smear of tomato sauce and ground lamb, which was delicately spiced with something cinnamony, then sprinkled with pine nuts. The homemade sausages were also made of ground lamb, but with a subtly different, hot, piquant flavour, pan fried with lemon, and none of the odd chewy bits in your average English banger.

The third dish was made from juicy aubergine, tomato, onion and chick peas, and tasted gloriously fresh, warming and wholesome.

I’d read that vegetable dishes are the bedrock of Lebanese cooking and even with the flavourless selection available on our shores, magic was worked with them.

With hindsight, we had overdone it with the lamb slightly; given the generous portions, we would have been wiser saving a few of those dishes for a later visit.

The table adjacent to us – people on other tables always make the cleverest menu choices – stuck, less greedily, to the ubiquitous but classic hummus, prawns, olives, falafel. We were expecting to share a main, but two huge platters of meat arrived, delivered by the beaming waitress/bar lady, accompanied by a huge mound of tabouleh and parsley salad and a huge bowl of glossy rice and nutty-tasting noodles.