A Coffee Tray

It is disrespectful to visit someone in Lebanon without being offered Turkish (a.k.a Arabic or Greek) coffee.

The coffee making kettle is on every stove.

They come in every colour, size and design - for making 1 to 12 cups of coffee.

Making Turkish coffee is an art (to make sure it does not turn into a messy production if you are not careful).

You can make it without, with a little or with a lot of sugar. Some even add cardamom to it.

Serving Turkish coffee is even more complex than making it.

The selection of coffee cups are endless. You can buy them with or without handles, in different sizes, colours, quality of glass, and on and on.

Then there is the choice of the tray to put the cups on it with the kettle and serve it.

The following are a selection of Turkish coffee trays to give you a sense of the art of coffee serving.

A sample of an average cute coffee tray for two.

This is how the no-handle cups look like; and of course cigarettes are a must with a cup of Turkish coffee.

Those cups became trendy few years ago. Each of them has written on it "with sugar" or "without". If you have different visitors who like it different ways, you can serve the tray with a mix of sweet and not sweet coffee cups and know which one is which.

Coffee trays can be extremely fancy - those are reserved to serving special people like the town's priest or the Minster of this or that or serving coffee on special occasions.

Or they can be simple and plastic, like the ones I had at a corner store after shopping.

Sometimes the coffee may turn from Turkish to Instant, but the ritual of a coffee tray remains the same.

Now what to serve with a coffee tray is a completely different story. But that is for another trip.