At the lower end of Monot street, the beating heart of the capital's vibrant nightlife, revelers walk into bar "1975" to find themselves thrown back into the tragic, but warm spirit of the devastating 15-year war.
"The cannons may have been silenced, but we are still living other kinds of economic, political, and social wars, with repression, displacements, poverty, and emigration," said co-owner Joseph Dakkash.
"We wanted to open a place to remind the Lebanese and the world that the war is not over," added Dakkash, himself born in 1975, the year the war broke out.
Smoke billows out from the bar, but it is not from shelling. The bar's other partner, Rony Zerbe, has designed military-style metallic narghile hookah waterpipes for customers to puff on.
A postwar, nonchalant, generation of young men and women wearing the latest Western clothes relax in the bar's upper lounge area under walls of sandbags and a ceiling covered with a dark green tank camouflage net.
Helmet-clad, bearded waiters and bartenders wearing military pants and T-shirts serve drinks across the room - a combination of an underground shelter and fortified trenches.
Tank shells rest on the steps of the stairs leading from the lower bar area to the upper floor bar and lounge zone where ammunition boxes are filled with ice and bottles of vodka.
Popular wartime graffiti - "caution, mines" and "freedom" - adorn the walls riddled with bullets and mortar rounds.
"Passed by here," is also sprayed on one of the walls. During the war, militiamen marked their names followed by "passed by here," as a personal signature to mark their territory.
A gigantic effigy of a fearsome masked militiaman, with a fake sniper rifle on his shoulder, climbs up on a pillar towering over the lower bar.
Behind the bar, a bearded young man juggles with vodka and juice glasses while wearing an army T-shirt and a military-style identification plate around his neck bearing his rank and number: "bartender, 1975."
Behind the till sits "Sergeant Jamil" who has his military rank sewn on his white T-shirt.
A musician strums the melancholic traditionAl Arabic lute - the Oud - as he sings nostalgic songs from legendary diva Fayruz and her son, rebel composer Ziad Rahbani, that radio stations once aired continuously to calm the nerves of the people during times of bombardments.
Every now and then, the DJ plays a mulhak, or "newsflash," taped during the war in which the announcer warns of the start of a new round of heavy shelling and advises citizens to stay indoors and to take precautions.
Customers are also served cheese spread on kaak, a Lebanese traditional hard-crust sesame bread which can long be stored for long without refrigeration - electricity was a rare commodity during wartime.
Kaak was considered "shelter food" during the war but today the country's acute economic crisis has made it lunch for many people.
Michel Koussafi, 36, store manager at the national mail company, should have a lot of reasons not to be here.
"In 1988 I was left half-paralyzed from a rocket attack. I recovered with great difficulty and physiotherapy. But Lebanese life is about moving forward.
"The place reminds us of the war, but also of a social life once so much warmer, when people helped each other and spent evenings together - even if it was in the shelter," he said.
© 2004 Agence France-Presse
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