On a weekday evening on South Old Woodward, the valet line outside Phoenicia tells you something about the Lebanese in Birmingham, Michigan. The men stepping out of German sedans are surgeons and litigators and the second generation of family firms. They greet the host in Arabic and English in the same breath, and they have been coming to this corner of one of the wealthiest suburbs in America for the better part of fifty years.
The Place
Birmingham sits about twenty miles north of downtown Detroit, strung along the Woodward Avenue corridor in the southeastern corner of Oakland County, long counted among the wealthiest counties in the country. It was settled in 1819 and named in 1838 after Birmingham, England, by residents who hoped it would grow into a prosperous manufacturing town.
What it became instead is a compact, walkable city of brick storefronts, white-tablecloth restaurants and roughly 21,800 residents, with a median household income above $120,000. The downtown is the draw: a few dense blocks of boutiques and dining around Shain Park, the kind of place where a city of professionals gathers after work.
How It Became Lebanese
The Lebanese did not start in Birmingham. They started downtown, in Detroit, and the road from there to Old Woodward took the better part of a century.
The first arrivals downtown
Lebanese Christians began reaching Detroit in numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawn first by trade and then by the wages of the automobile industry. They settled close to the river, in the blocks around East Congress Street, which became the heart of an early Maronite and Melkite community.
They came from specific mountain towns, not from Lebanon in the abstract. Families traced their roots to villages such as Hasroun, Serhel and Zahle, and to the Kesrawan and Metn districts, and they recreated those ties through parish life and hometown social clubs.
Detroit grew into one of the largest Maronite communities in the country, and the institutions followed. The first Maronite exarchate in the United States was established in 1966 and raised to the Eparchy of Saint Maron in 1971, with its first bishop, Francis Zayek, seated in Detroit before the see moved east. The early parish life that began near East Congress Street seeded a community that would spend the next several decades climbing and dispersing.
The suburban turn
After the Second World War, the pattern that reshaped every American city reshaped this community too. As the children of the first immigrants moved into the professions, they moved out of the old downtown enclaves and north along the county’s wealthy spine.
The split that still defines metro Detroit’s Lebanese geography hardened in these decades. The large, mostly Muslim Lebanese population concentrated in Dearborn and east Dearborn, around the auto plants. The Christian Lebanese, Maronite and Melkite and Greek Orthodox, scattered into Oakland County, into Southfield and Farmington Hills and the Bloomfields, and into Birmingham.
This was a quieter migration than the one that built Dearborn, and it left fewer obvious markers. Where Dearborn announced itself with bakeries, mosques and Arabic signage along Warren Avenue, the Christian Lebanese who reached Birmingham folded into an affluent, mostly white-collar suburb. Their presence registered in professional offices and at restaurant tables rather than on storefront fascia, which is one reason the community is easy to overlook and hard to count.
A restaurant becomes a landmark
If one story captures the Lebanese arrival in Birmingham, it belongs to Sameer Eid. He was born on 24 January 1940 to a Greek Orthodox family in Marjayoun, in southern Lebanon, and came to the United States in 1961 to study, eventually passing through college in Oklahoma.
In 1971 he bought a tiny, unmarked Highland Park restaurant called Phoenicia for $5,700, with no hospitality experience and a custom-drapery business behind him. A 1973 review sent business climbing, and in 1982 Eid moved the restaurant north to Birmingham and turned it into a white-tablecloth room.
That decision matters more than it sounds. By planting a high-end Lebanese restaurant in the centre of the region’s most prosperous suburb, Eid put his community’s food on the same footing as its growing professional class. Phoenicia drew national praise from Esquire, Travel + Leisure and Wine Spectator, and it served generations of Lebanese families who had themselves moved up Woodward.
The second generation
Eid’s son Samy joined the business around 2002 and now runs it, and the family expanded into a small group, Chickpea Hospitality. They opened Forest on Forest Avenue in Birmingham in 2015, added Wilder’s nearby, and named a modern Lebanese restaurant in Detroit’s Capitol Park, Leila, after Samy’s mother.
That arc, from an immigrant who took a seventy-five-percent pay cut to a second generation building a restaurant group across the suburb and back into the city, mirrors the broader Lebanese professional story in Oakland County. Sameer Eid died on 15 August 2025, at eighty-five, after fifty-four years in business.
The Landmarks
Phoenicia, 588 S. Old Woodward Avenue. The anchor of Lebanese Birmingham, in business since 1971 and at this address since 1982. Sameer Eid built it into one of the longest continuously running family restaurants in the region, a white-tablecloth room that introduced refined Lebanese cooking to the suburb’s professional class.
Forest, 735 Forest Avenue. Opened by Samy and Sameer Eid in November 2015, a few blocks from Phoenicia. The upscale, Mediterranean-leaning restaurant showed the family widening its range while staying rooted in Birmingham’s downtown.
Chickpea Hospitality. The Eid family’s restaurant group, born from Phoenicia and now running multiple rooms in Birmingham and Detroit. It is the institutional form of a single immigrant family’s half-century on Old Woodward.
Shain Park, 151 Martin Street. The green heart of downtown Birmingham, a few minutes’ walk from the Lebanese restaurants on Old Woodward and Forest. With its band shell, fountain and Marshall Fredericks sculpture, it is the public square of the city this community chose.
Old Woodward Avenue. The retail spine of downtown, and the street that carries Birmingham’s Lebanese addresses. The valet stands and storefronts along it are where the community’s professional life is most visible after dark.
The Woodward corridor north to the Bloomfields. Birmingham sits on the same M-1 spine that runs up to Bloomfield Hills and across to West Bloomfield, the wealthier townships where many Lebanese Christian families also settled. The corridor is the thread tying these adjacent enclaves together.
Where They Came From
The Lebanese Christians who reached metro Detroit came overwhelmingly from the mountain villages and valley towns of Lebanon: places like Hasroun, Serhel and Zahle, and the Kesrawan and Metn districts inland from Beirut. Maronite and Melkite Catholics predominated, alongside Greek Orthodox families like the Eids of Marjayoun in the south.
They left a homeland of poor mountain farming and, later, of war, and they followed relatives and townspeople who had already found footing in Detroit’s economy. The earliest arrivals worked in trade and the auto plants; their children and grandchildren became the doctors, lawyers and business owners who could afford a house in Oakland County.
That climb is part of a broader Arab American pattern in the region. More than four in ten Arab Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the share with postgraduate degrees runs well above the national average. In a metro area where the great majority of Arab Americans live across Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, the Christian Lebanese who reached Birmingham were among those who turned education into a foothold in the wealthiest suburbs.
The religious geography travelled with them. Maronite and Melkite parishes that began downtown followed their congregations outward over the decades, the same way Saint Sharbel, founded in Detroit in 1916, eventually moved north to Warren as its families spread into the suburbs. Birmingham’s Lebanese tend to worship at parishes scattered across Oakland and Macomb rather than at a single neighbourhood church, a sign of just how dispersed this prosperous community has become.
Birmingham Today
Birmingham is not an ethnic enclave, and the Lebanese here would be the first to say so. They are a thread in an affluent, overwhelmingly professional suburb, more visible at a restaurant table or a law firm masthead than in a census tract. The hard demographic counts for a community this dispersed are simply not published at the city level, and it would be a mistake to invent them.
What is real is the institutional weight a few families have built. The Eids and their restaurants gave Lebanese Birmingham a centre of gravity that has outlasted the founder, and the food they serve is, for many local families, the taste of a homeland they or their parents left behind.
For Christian Lebanese in Oakland County, Birmingham is the polished downtown version of a longer journey: from the mountains of Lebanon, through the old Maronite and Melkite blocks of Detroit, out to the suburbs along Woodward. It is distinct from the working-class Muslim Lebanese hub of the Lebanese in Dearborn, and a near neighbour to the wealthier enclaves of the Lebanese in Bloomfield Hills and the Lebanese in West Bloomfield, just up the same corridor that drew the Indians of Farmington Hills and other professional immigrant communities into Oakland County.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the Lebanese in Birmingham, Michigan mostly Christian or Muslim?
The Lebanese in Birmingham, Michigan are predominantly Christian, including Maronite, Melkite and Greek Orthodox families. This distinguishes them from the large, mostly Muslim Lebanese community concentrated in Dearborn, closer to Detroit’s auto plants.
Why did Lebanese families settle in Birmingham rather than Dearborn?
As Lebanese Christians moved into the professions through the twentieth century, they left the older downtown Detroit enclaves and moved north into wealthy Oakland County suburbs like Birmingham. Dearborn remained the centre of the working-class, largely Muslim Lebanese population.
What is the most famous Lebanese landmark in Birmingham?
Phoenicia, at 588 S. Old Woodward Avenue, is the best-known. Founded by Sameer Eid in 1971 and moved to Birmingham in 1982, it became a celebrated white-tablecloth Lebanese restaurant and a fixture for the area’s Lebanese professional families.
Who was Sameer Eid?
Sameer Eid was a Greek Orthodox Lebanese immigrant from Marjayoun, born in 1940, who came to the United States in 1961 and founded Phoenicia. He built it into one of metro Detroit’s signature restaurants over fifty-four years and died in August 2025 at the age of eighty-five.
Is Birmingham a Lebanese neighbourhood?
No. Birmingham is an affluent, mixed professional suburb, not an ethnic enclave. The Lebanese in Birmingham, Michigan are a dispersed professional community whose presence shows in its restaurants and institutions rather than in a single concentrated neighbourhood.
Where did Birmingham’s Lebanese families originally come from?
Most trace their roots to the mountain villages and valley towns of Lebanon, places like Hasroun, Serhel, Zahle and the Kesrawan and Metn districts, with some from the south, such as Marjayoun. They followed earlier relatives and townspeople who had settled in Detroit.
If your family’s story passed through Birmingham, or any of the places Lebanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the mountain villages of Lebanon to a table on Old Woodward Avenue, to wherever you are now.