Money talks, wealth whispers. Except in Lebanon, a country struggling to exit a deep economic crisis, where wealth has been screaming louder than usual.
On a recent Friday evening, new imported luxury cars lined the streets below Beirut’s Sky Bar. Inside the rooftop venue, waiters wound their way through well-dressed hordes to hand out sparklers and $400 bottles of Dom Pérignon champagne with a sense of urgency reserved for a crisis.
But the closest thing to an emergency was a tequila shortage on one table. “We cleaned them out of Don Julio,” said Jean, a Rolex-wearing 27-year-old back in Beirut visiting from his base in west Africa. “That’s what happens when there are too many high rollers.”
Sky Bar was a popular nightspot well before Lebanon’s crisis began in 2019, but closed its doors that year as anti-establishment protests gripped the nation and a banking crisis morphed into a devastating financial collapse, with gross domestic product contracting by 40 per cent.