The upside-down rice-and-meat dish popular in Lebanon and flipped before serving is maqluba.
Maqluba is a Levantine layered dish made by arranging meat, rice, and fried vegetables in a cooking pot. When the pot is inverted onto a serving platter, the ingredients emerge as a dramatic layered mound, which explains the Arabic name’s association with being turned over or upside down.
Recipes vary across Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and neighboring regions. Chicken or lamb may be used, while eggplant and cauliflower are especially common vegetables; potatoes, tomatoes, and fish also appear in regional versions. Pine nuts, parsley, yogurt, or salad often accompany the dish.
Maqluba is not simply another rice pilaf such as biryani or kabsa. Its defining feature is the careful layering and final inversion. The earliest recorded reference to a dish called maqluba appears in a 13th-century Abbasid cookbook, although that version was an egg dish rather than the modern rice preparation.