Pedestrians on Beirut’s Hamra Street slow at the sound of something being battered. As they get closer, they find that the sound is coming from a Syrian ice cream parlor called Fasatoq wa Bunuduq — "Pistachio and Nut" in Arabic — where traditional Damascus ice cream is pounded with a huge hammer.

Behind the counter, Butros pounds the milky ice cream in an icy metal container while in front of the store Hassan urges a group of Iraqi passers-by to taste the Damascene sweets, nuts or pistachio-covered ice cream, just like the ones found in the legendary Bakdash ice cream parlor in the old city of Damascus.

Over the past year, many Syrian confectioneries with colorful windows and sellers out front have sprung up like mushrooms in the Hamra neighborhood. It started with a few peddlers who fled the war in Syria for Lebanon making a living in Beirut by selling nuts. One of them was Elias Khoury, who eventually set up his small open-air stand by the wall of a parking lot on Hamra Street.

Khoury’s journey from Syria to Lebanon was far from happy. When the war in Syria broke out, he sold his grocery shop and decided to go to Brazil, where his brother lived. He used up all the money he had for the trip, but stayed there less than a year.