On a warm spring weekend in El Cajon, the parking lot of a church on Medford Street fills with the smell of charcoal and za’atar, the sound of a doumbek, and the linked-arm step of the dabke. This is where you find the Lebanese in San Diego, not in a single street of shopfronts, but gathered around a faith, a kitchen, and a memory of cedar-covered mountains an ocean away. They are a community that built quietly and then, once a year, lets the whole county hear them.
The Place
San Diego is not one city so much as a constellation of them, strung from the Pacific bluffs of La Jolla and Point Loma inland to the dry valleys of El Cajon and the canyons of College Area. It is California’s second-largest city, a place of biotech campuses, naval shipyards, and university research hospitals that has long drawn educated newcomers from around the world.
The Lebanese did not settle here in a tidy ethnic enclave the way some communities did. Instead they spread across the county, drawn by the same professions and climate that drew everyone else.
What gives them a centre of gravity is not geography but institution: a Maronite church in El Cajon, a scattering of family restaurants along El Cajon Boulevard, and an annual festival that turns a parish car park into a small piece of Lebanon.
How It Became Lebanese
The story of the Lebanese in San Diego is, more than most, a story told through a church. To understand the community, you have to follow the building of St. Ephrem.
The first families, early 1970s
The community traces its beginnings to the early 1970s, when, in the words of the parish’s own history, “several Lebanese families and young college students who resided in the San Diego area” began looking for somewhere to worship in their own tradition. There was no Maronite church in the county and no obvious place to gather.
The solution was improvised and intimate. Fr. Denis Krouse, a Roman Catholic priest with bi-ritual authorisation to celebrate the Maronite liturgy, began saying Mass in private homes. The kitchen table and the living room were the first altars of Lebanese San Diego.
Borrowed chapels, 1980s
Through the 1980s the gatherings outgrew the homes. Services moved to the seminary chapel at the University of San Diego and then to Holy Angels Byzantine Church, the Lebanese borrowing space from neighbours who understood Eastern liturgy.
The arrangement held until the community had grown large enough to be recognised in its own right. In 1989, Archbishop Francis Zayek, the founding head of the Maronite eparchy in the United States, formally established St. Ephrem as a mission, with Fr. Antoine Bach assisting Fr. Krouse.
A church of its own, 1991 to 1999
In 1991 the mission received its first dedicated pastor, Fr. Nabil Mouannes, who would go on to serve for some twenty-one years. With a permanent priest came permanent ambitions. In 1992 the parish bought a parcel of land in Del Mar, on the affluent coastal side of the county, intending to build there.
Those plans changed. By the end of the decade the community had redirected its efforts inland, and in 1999 it purchased its present home in El Cajon, at 750 Medford Street. After nearly three decades of borrowed rooms, the Lebanese of San Diego finally had a church they owned.
Roots that deepened, 2001 onward
What followed was steady building. Between 2001 and 2003 the parish constructed the Mariam Mother of Life shrine on the grounds. In 2006 it acquired adjacent properties to expand its footprint.
In 2012 Rev. Toufic Nasr became pastor, and under his leadership the parish kept growing outward. In 2019 it bought four acres in the northern part of San Diego County, an investment in a future generation of worshippers further up the coast, and in 2020 it completed a community centre at the El Cajon site.
St. Ephrem belongs to the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles, led by Bishop Abdallah Elias Zaidan, himself born in the Lebanese village of Kosaybé. The El Cajon parish is one node in a network that stretches across thirty-four states, but for San Diego’s Lebanese it is the centre of everything.
A wider Arab San Diego
The Lebanese arrived into a region that would, over later decades, become one of the most significant Arab American centres in California. The cities of San Diego and El Cajon together are home to a large share of the state’s Arab American population, and El Cajon in particular has drawn tens of thousands of residents of Arab background.
Much of that later growth, especially in El Cajon, came from Iraqi, Chaldean, and Assyrian families rather than Lebanese ones. The Lebanese sit within this broader story as one of its older Christian threads, a community that put down roots before the larger waves arrived. In California, people of Lebanese ancestry make up roughly a quarter of the state’s Arab American population, and many of San Diego’s are the professionals and their descendants who came for universities, hospitals, and the coast.
The Landmarks
St. Ephrem Maronite Catholic Church, 750 Medford Street, El Cajon. This is the heart of Lebanese San Diego, the building toward which three decades of borrowed rooms were pointing. Its Divine Liturgy is celebrated through the week and on weekends, and its grounds hold the Mariam Mother of Life shrine. For most of the county’s Lebanese Catholics, this is home.
The San Diego Lebanese Festival, St. Ephrem grounds, El Cajon. For more than two decades the parish has thrown a three-day celebration each year that draws more than 8,000 visitors from San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles counties. There is saj bread baked on the spot, tabbouleh and hummus and kibbeh, folkloric dancing, live music, and a beer-and-wine garden. It is the one weekend a year when the wider city comes to the Lebanese rather than the other way around.
Alforon, 5965 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego. Founded by George Salameh, who grew up around his father’s restaurant in Lebanon, Alforon makes its food from scratch each day with imported Lebanese spices and herbs. Its reputation reaches well beyond the neighbourhood: it has been ranked among the very top of Yelp’s list of US restaurants, a remarkable showing for a family Mediterranean bakery on a working San Diego boulevard.
Abraj Mediterranean Restaurant, 6475 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego. A few blocks from Alforon, Abraj opened in 2010 as the lifelong dream of its owner, Mike Naoum. It trades in generous, affordable plates of fresh Mediterranean food, the kind of unpretentious neighbourhood spot that becomes a fixture rather than a destination.
Fairouz Cafe and Gallery, 3166 Midway Drive, San Diego. Out toward Point Loma, Fairouz is named for Lebanon’s most beloved singer and run by the artist Ibrahim Al Nashashibi, whose paintings line the walls and whose poems sit under the glass of the tables. The family serves Lebanese and Greek dishes, the matriarch still cooks, and the room feels less like a restaurant than a salon.
El Cajon Boulevard. Not a single address but a long commercial spine running east from City Heights, the boulevard has become the closest thing San Diego has to a Mediterranean restaurant row, with Lebanese kitchens sitting alongside the wider Arab food scene that grew up around them. It is where the everyday life of the community happens between festivals.
The University of San Diego seminary chapel. Long before St. Ephrem had a building, this campus chapel was one of the borrowed rooms where the community gathered. It is not a Lebanese landmark in any official sense, but it is part of the community’s memory, one of the way-stations on the road to a church of its own.
Where They Came From
Lebanon is a small country with an outsized diaspora. Since the late nineteenth century its people have left in waves, first as Christian peddlers and merchants fanning out across the Americas, then in much larger numbers during and after the civil war that began in 1975 and ground on for fifteen years.
San Diego’s Lebanese reflect that pattern, weighted toward the later arrivals. The community that founded St. Ephrem in the early 1970s included families and college students already settled in the area, and the church grew as more came, many of them educated professionals drawn by the region’s universities, research hospitals, and biotech and defence economies.
They came overwhelmingly as Christians, Maronite above all, the church that has been the spiritual home of Mount Lebanon for centuries. That is why a community without a single neighbourhood could still cohere: the rite travelled with them, and the parish became the place where Lebanese identity in San Diego was kept and passed on.
San Diego Today
The Lebanese in San Diego remain, in the main, a professional and dispersed community. You will not find a Lebanese quarter to walk through. You will find a doctor in La Jolla, an engineer in Rancho Bernardo, a restaurateur on El Cajon Boulevard, and on Sunday morning you will find a good many of them in the same pews in El Cajon.
That dispersal is both a strength and a quiet worry. Affluence and integration have been good to the community, but they make it harder to hand down a language and a liturgy to children who grow up as Californians first. The parish’s purchase of land in the north county in 2019 is partly an answer to that: a bet that the next generation, scattered further still, will need a closer place to gather.
The festival, meanwhile, does what no neighbourhood could. Once a year it makes the community visible to itself and to everyone else, eight thousand people moving through a parish lot to the sound of a familiar song. It is proof that a community held together by faith and food rather than geography can still, when it chooses, fill a place with Lebanon.
San Diego’s Lebanese story sits alongside the larger one of Lebanese families in Houston, Texas and the deep Maronite roots of metropolitan Detroit, from Lebanese Dearborn to the affluent suburbs of Lebanese Troy and Grosse Pointe, as well as the professional enclave of Lebanese Vienna, Virginia. Closer to home, the Lebanese share Southern California with communities like the Persians of San Diego and the Israelis of Palo Alto.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Lebanese in San Diego live?
The Lebanese in San Diego are dispersed rather than concentrated in one neighbourhood, with many living as professionals across affluent areas like La Jolla and the inland valleys. Their communal centre is St. Ephrem Maronite Catholic Church in El Cajon, which serves as the focal point for the county’s Lebanese Catholic community.
What is the main Lebanese church in San Diego?
St. Ephrem Maronite Catholic Church at 750 Medford Street in El Cajon is the spiritual home of the Lebanese in San Diego. It grew from house Masses in the early 1970s into a parish that bought its El Cajon site in 1999, and it belongs to the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles.
When did Lebanese people settle in San Diego?
An organised Lebanese community took shape in San Diego in the early 1970s, when several Lebanese families and college students began gathering for Maronite worship in private homes. Many arrived as part of the wider Lebanese emigration that intensified during and after the civil war that began in 1975.
What is the San Diego Lebanese Festival?
It is a three-day annual celebration hosted by St. Ephrem on its El Cajon grounds, drawing more than 8,000 visitors from across Southern California. It features traditional Lebanese food, folkloric dancing, live music, and a beer-and-wine garden, and has run for more than two decades.
Where can you eat Lebanese food in San Diego?
El Cajon Boulevard is the closest thing San Diego has to a Mediterranean restaurant row, home to spots like Alforon and Abraj. Fairouz Cafe and Gallery near Point Loma offers Lebanese and Greek dishes in a room hung with the owner’s own paintings.
Are the Lebanese in San Diego mostly Christian?
Yes. San Diego’s Lebanese community is overwhelmingly Christian and predominantly Maronite Catholic, which is why a church rather than a neighbourhood became its centre. The Maronite rite is the historic faith of Mount Lebanon and travelled with the community to California.
If your family’s story passed through San Diego, or any of the places Lebanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the mountains of Lebanon to a parish on Medford Street in El Cajon, to wherever you are now.