Furn Beaino started with a meat pie and a 20-year-old baker in a city at war. Five decades later, Wissam El Beaino is taking the family brand across the GCC — one cloud kitchen, one flagship store, one master franchise at a time. Toni Beaino opened his bakery in 1975. Lebanon had just gone to war. He was 20 years old, working out of a cramped stall in Jounieh, a port town north of Beirut.
He was working with no logo, no recipe cards, and a menu lean enough to recite from memory: thyme manakish, cheese manakish, spinach — and the one that would outlast the wars, the explosions, the financial ruin, and the border crossings to reach Dubai kitchens fifty years later. Lahm baajin. Spiced minced lamb on a whisper-thin flatbread, finished with lemon, a crack of pepper, eaten hot off the stone.
Every morning, Toni woke up at 3 A.M. to cut the meat himself.
A Family Recipe, a Family Name
“Furn” means bakery in Arabic. The restaurant’s name is also the family’s surname — a detail that tells you everything about what this business has always meant to the Beainos. There was no separation between the brand and the bloodline. When the stall eventually outgrew Jounieh and relocated to the neighboring enclave of Sarba, the family moved with it. When it found its permanent home around 1990 — a modest pickup counter with a terrace and a few bar stools — that spot became a pilgrimage site for Lebanese expats who flew home and went directly from the airport to eat lahm baajin.
That’s not marketing. That’s mythology.
Toni, now 72, still walks into the central kitchen each morning to prepare the meat. Not the poultry, not the salads, not the wraps that have since filled out a menu that now runs to pizzas and desserts. Just the lahm baajin. His lahm baajin. The recipe that lives in his hands because it was never written down.
His son Wissam, the brand’s CEO and the architect of its GCC expansion, does not struggle to describe what his father built. “He’s a person who loves his work, who loves his family, who did a lot, who sacrificed a lot. He kept on fighting, showing his passion and his love to his family and to his job through Furn Beaino.”
Wissam’s younger brother, Samer, holds the fort in Lebanon as co-CEO, keeping the original bakery culture intact on the same soil that gave it life. Meanwhile, Wissam — an engineer by training, the holder of a master’s degree and several academic publications — walked away from a career in engineering in 2018 when the business demanded more than after-hours attention. Furn Beaino needed a full-time general. He became one.
From Beirut to Business Bay
The Beirut port explosion of August 4, 2020, shook more than buildings. It shook the calculus of every Lebanese entrepreneur trying to plan beyond the next quarter. Wissam arrived in Dubai shortly after, reading the map clearly: Lebanon’s instability, its currency collapse, its political gridlock, had made aggressive investment there a fantasy. The Gulf offered something that Lebanon, for all its warmth, could no longer guarantee — the ability to plan.
The brand’s first UAE outpost, a cloud kitchen in Business Bay, opened in 2022. A second followed in 2023 on Hessa Street. A third came in Silicon Oasis. Each one operated lean, built loyalty fast, and let the team stress-test demand before committing to anything heavier. The strategy worked. Dubai revenue has grown at a steady 30 percent clip. The flagship stores are next. A full brick-and-mortar location at Bay Square in Business Bay is scheduled for 2026, with two more flagships to follow before the year’s end.
Cloud kitchens in Abu Dhabi’s Al Reem Island, Sharjah, and Ras Al-Khaimah are slotted in behind them. By 2030, the company aims to expand to more than 70 locations across the GCC. That number gains weight when you consider what the brand is carrying into those locations: ISO 22000 and FSSC 22000 food safety certifications, the latter awarded by UKAS — a British body regarded as one of the most stringent on the planet — making Furn Beaino among the few food operations in Lebanon to hold it.
“Expanding our partnership with Ambrosia Foods allows us to scale responsibly, enter new markets faster, and deliver the same authentic experience our customers have trusted since 1975,” Wissam said.
That partnership with Ambrosia Foods, the GCC platform backed by Pulsar Capital, does more than open doors. Through it, Furn Beaino has secured the master franchise rights for Mr. Brown, an American diner concept, adding a second brand to its portfolio and expanding the audience it can attract across the region. The plan is no longer just to bring Lebanese food to the Gulf. It’s to build a multi-brand food group with the Beaino name at its core.
Toni Beaino probably didn’t have that in mind at 3 A.M. in a Jounieh bakery in 1975. Then again, he was just trying to feed people — and doing it well enough that, fifty years later, his sons are still at it.