Sofra
سفرة
Press Kit
Lebanese and Syrian home cooking, written down before it's lost — from Beirut, Aleppo, and Idlib.
What Sofra is
Sofra is a recipe app and website documenting the home cooking of Lebanon and Syria — the dishes families actually make, recorded from home cooks with their regions named: Beirut, the Lebanese mountains, Aleppo, Idlib. Most of these recipes were never written down; they were learned standing at someone's elbow. Sofra writes them down so the next hands have them too.
Every recipe is free to read on sofrabeirut.com. In the app, 112 recipes are free to cook in full; membership opens the rest, along with step-by-step audio guidance.
Quick facts
- 214 recipes, each labelled with its real region — Lebanese and Syrian cuisines honored separately, dish by dish.
- A dedicated collection of Idlib home cooking — including the four-shapes kibbeh tradition, where one bowl of dough becomes four different dishes — documented in English, on its own terms.
- Free to read — every recipe on sofrabeirut.com, with no account and no paywall. In the app, 112 recipes are free to cook in full; membership opens the rest, along with audio guidance.
- Hands-free Cook Mode — the app reads steps aloud and advances while you cook.
- Audio guidance: every one of the 214 recipes is narrated in English, Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese, and four are told in the voice of Faten — the Idlib home cook behind the app's Syrian collection.
- Available on the App Store and Google Play; all recipes also free to read on the web at sofrabeirut.com.
The story
Sofra began with a simple observation: the recipes that matter most are the ones nobody wrote down. A generation that cooked by feel — "until it smells right," "more parsley than you think" — is passing, and with it goes the table.
The app's Syrian collection comes from Faten's kitchen in Idlib: family recipes passed down through generations, documented dish by dish with their stories. The Lebanese collection carries the cooking of Beirut and the mountains. Sofra keeps the two cuisines distinct — because a Syrian dish is not a Lebanese dish, and both are treasures.
Story angles
- Cultural preservation through software: documenting a displaced region's home cooking (Idlib) in English for the first generation that may not learn it at the stove.
- The diaspora kitchen: recipes "from kitchens carried far from Beirut and Idlib" — food as the way the table remembers.
- One bowl of dough, four dishes: the Idlib kibbeh tradition (mdawara, arfaliyeh, mthallathat, and the tray) as living food heritage.
- The sound of it: recipes read aloud while you cook — an app built for hands in the dough, not on the screen.
Press contact & assets
Interviews, screenshots, hero imagery, and review access available on request.