By Andrea Joy Dizon
Toni Beaino was twenty years old, and Lebanon was at war. The year was 1975. Bombs fell, borders shifted, and an entire country lurched into a civil conflict that would grind on for fifteen years. Most people looked for cover. Toni looked for a stall. He found one in Jounieh, a coastal town just north of Beirut. The setup was bare-bones: a wood-fired oven, a handful of ingredients, and hands that knew exactly what to do with them.
He made manakish, traditional Lebanese flatbreads topped with thyme, cheese, and spinach, and lahm baajin, his soon-to-be-legendary minced lamb pie, fragrant with onions and tomatoes and finished with a squeeze of lemon. There were no printed recipes. No operations manuals. Just a young man, a hot oven, and the kind of stubbornness that only survival can produce. “He used to wake up at 3 A.M. every day,” his son Wissam recalled.
“Even when he was super tired, super sick, he went. When you have to survive, you have to do it for your family. You have to do it right.” That modest stall in Jounieh is now the origin story of Furn Beaino, furn being Arabic for bakery, a Lebanese F&B brand with locations across the UAE, an accelerating GCC expansion, and a partnership that could carry the family name to 70 locations by 2030. What started as one man’s wartime hustle has become, over fifty years and across two generations, one of the Middle East’s most beloved fast-casual brands.
A Son’s Decision to Go All In
For years, Wissam El Beaino lived a different kind of life. He earned an engineering degree, completed a master’s program at one of Lebanon’s top universities, spent eight years in the engineering sector, and published academic papers. He was, by any measure, successful. But something kept pulling him back to the bakery. The shift came in 2017, when the Beaino family opened a central kitchen in Lebanon and began building the brand with the seriousness it deserved. A proper branding. Documented processes.
A push to earn the food safety certifications that would signal, beyond any marketing copy, that Furn Beaino operated at the highest possible standard. They earned ISO 22000:2005 in 2018, upgraded to ISO 22000:2018 in 2019, and most recently captured the FSSC 22000 certification from UKAS, the British accreditation body widely regarded as the world’s gold standard in food safety. Furn Beaino became one of only three food businesses in all of Lebanon to hold that distinction. Wissam resigned from his engineering career and stepped into a full-time role.
His brother, Samer, took on the co-CEO role, anchoring Lebanon’s operations. And Wissam set his sights on the Gulf. “It’s something that runs in the veins,” he said of the brand. “The name of the restaurant comes from our family name. It’s the only thing you have, and you really want to take good care of it.” The four values Toni built the business on, Quality, Consistency, Passion, and Pride, were formalized and embedded so deeply into the brand’s DNA that they appear as the four parallel lines in the Furn Beaino logo.
From Cloud Kitchens to a GCC Footprint
The Lebanon of Toni Beaino’s generation had been devastating, civil war, financial collapse, a currency that shed 99% of its value, and on August 4, 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in recorded history tore through the port of Beirut. Wissam had already made his move. He relocated to Dubai, scouted the market, and launched Furn Beaino’s first UAE cloud kitchen in Business Bay in 2022. A second followed in Hessa Street in 2023. A third opened in Silicon Oasis shortly after. Revenue from Dubai operations grew 30 percent year-on-year.
The next chapter is bigger. A flagship dine-in store, a full brick-and-mortar location, opened in Bay Square, Business Bay in early 2026. Additional cloud kitchens are rolling out in Sharjah and Ras Al-Khaimah. Abu Dhabi’s Al Reem Island already has a location. And the engine powering all of it is a deepened partnership with Ambrosia Foods, a regional F&B platform with the networks and capital to accelerate what the Beaino family has built. Through that partnership, Furn Beaino has also secured master franchise rights for Mr. Brown, a beloved American diner brand, across the entire GCC region, a move that signals the company’s transformation from a family bakery to a multi-concept hospitality group. The target: more than 70 locations across the Gulf by 2030.
Back in Lebanon, Toni Beaino still walks into the central kitchen. At 72, after navigating a civil war, economic ruin, a catastrophic explosion, and a year of conflict with Israel, he still shows up before anyone else. He still prepares the lahm baajin meat filling by hand. His sons have taken that example, that relentless, unglamorous, deeply personal dedication, and built something the Gulf is only beginning to taste. “We want to preserve this for the coming generations,” Wissam said. “It’s about legacy. It’s about history.” In the F&B world, legacies like this are rarely manufactured. They have earned one flatbread at a time, over fifty years, by a family that never stopped showing up.
