"I will repair the damage and start serving alcohol again even if this means that they will bomb the place again," said Zeidan.

The Tyros restaurant, struck by a similar pre-dawn bombing three days before New Year's Eve, also rebounded quickly. Mohammed Mahmoud, a worker there, said the damage was repaired within hours.

"We are still serving alcohol and we will not change," he said. "These explosions are attacks on personal freedoms. A person is free to chose whether he wants to drink or no."

The first two blasts came on the same night in November. One ripped through a pub on the ground floor of the seaside Queen Elissa Hotel. Moments later, a liquor store was hit and heavily damaged. Patrick Kattoura, who runs the store for his father, said it had been selling alcohol since the 1980s and had never received threats. The store has reopened and resumed selling.

"It is my right to sell whatever I want as long as it does not violate Lebanese laws."

But the blasts have some worried.

After the Queen Elissa bombing, Nazih Arnaout, the brother of the owner of the Tyros restaurant, hung a large banner outside his own fish restaurant, called the Classic Tyros. "Sorry. We don't serve alcoholic beverages," it reads.

Asked why he stopped booze sales, Arnaout replied calmly, "so that they don't blow us up."

___

Bassem Mroue can be reached on twitter at http://twitter.com/bmroue