Monday night, 9 p.m. The darkened streets were eerily empty. At Bread, there were five people at a window table and a couple at the bar. "It looks promising," said Nemr Abboud, co-owner of the restaurant. "Yesterday, we had zero. Today for lunch, zero."

Half an hour later, Kamal Mouzawak, a leading proponent of organic farming in Lebanon, and three Italian companions sat down at another window table. "This is resistance," Mouzawak said. "Resistance is trying to have a regular life."

In recent days, there has been little regular life in Beirut. The Lebanese army has been fighting an Al-Qaeda-linked group in the northern part of the country, and bombs have gone off in the capital and elsewhere. Tourism has ground to a halt, and the normally hedonistic Lebanese have been staying home.

In a sort of mutiny of the bounty, a small cadre of gourmets and bons vivants has defiantly kept restaurants and produce markets open. They have pulled off a bread festival and held several dinners for visiting Italians with the Slow Food movement, which is trying to encourage biodiversity and save traditional foods around the world.

On this night, Bread's chef and co-owner, Walid Ataya, was serving everything on the menu. For starters: raw artichokes and homemade peppery merguez sausages, warm octopus salad and tartare de sardine — raw sardines in a brine of ginger and cilantro. Among the main courses, the grilled swordfish steak covered with capers, anchovies and bread crumbs drew special praise from the Italian guests, as did the seafood with frikeh, or green wheat.

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