Lebanese Festival
Baton Rouge
October 4, 2025
If you’ve driven around Baton Rouge, you know that we have an above average number of Greek/Lebanese restaurants in the city. Most were opened in the '70s-'90s and they all serve similar menus. What you can’t tell from first glance is that none of them are owned by Greek or Lebanese people. It was a way of marketing food to a Louisiana audience through a cuisine that they had maybe heard of/country they’d visited.
That being said, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I pulled up to the Lebanese Festival on Saturday. There is a sizable Lebanese population in Baton Rouge, according to one of the event’s organizers in years past. The library in Baton Rouge is one of the best cultural resources in the city, and it’s always interesting to watch it be transformed by whatever festival or event is happening there on the weekend. This was the third annual Baton Rouge Lebanese Festival, which is part cultural celebration, part fundraiser for St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church.
The festival had a mix of food, craft and thrift stalls. The main food vendor was Serop’s Cafe on Corporate Boulevard. Their chicken shawarma plate was good, but the Grecian sauce that came with it was amazing – probably my favorite Tzatziki among the ones I’ve had in Baton Rouge and potentially ever.
A few minutes after I received my food, performances started. Among them was a group from Phoenix Rouge, a local belly dance studio off Siegen Lane. (I’m aware of the controversy around the term “belly dance” as a colonial exonym, but am using the term because it is both what the group uses for itself and how the performance was billed at the festival.) It’s not the first time I’ve seen them perform, in fact, they were at Taste of the Deep South at the same venue just a few weeks ago.
For the Lebanese festival, Becca Blazek, performed a solo with Isis wings across the makeshift stage in fluid movements, and her silver wings were mezmerizing to watch. She has been belly dancing and performing for about eight years. She doesn’t have a cultural tie to the artform, though other people in her dance group do.
“We just love the culture and love the music,” she said in an interview after her performance.
And they share it. After their performances on both days, they teach a short and simple choreography to the song, “Dom Dom” by Mahmoud El Esseily which is also the choreography that people learn in their beginner’s class.
There’s so much policing around “authentic” cultural experiences within popular discourse, and to be clear, I think people should celebrate their cultures how they want. But I find that in places like Baton Rouge, it’s less cut and dry than in bigger cities. What does it mean to celebrate a culture especially when most people around you don’t know that much about it?
In the case of the Lebanese Festival, it seems to mean a fusion of things from different countries under the same banner of celebration, sharing and coming together. The sauce I had may not be Lebanese and the wings from Blazek’s performance were developed in the West and inspired by an Egyptian goddess, but maybe that doesn’t matter as much as having curiosity and learning about something that people otherwise would have remained ignorant of. Culture is ever evolving, and thanks to events like this, we can too.
