Monday, the members of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church will continue a 60-year tradition of giving Vicksburg residents a taste of Middle Eastern cuisine.

The annual Lebanese Dinner at the church, 2709 Washington St., draws about 3,500 people annually who come to savor the dishes prepared by the members.

This year’s dinner will be served at lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and dinner from 5 to 7 p.m. People can dine at the church or take their meals back to work or home.

Tickets are $15 and sold at the door at lunch only, said Rhonda Wright, dinner chairman. Tickets for the evening dinner are available by calling the church at 601-636-2483, or by contacting any church member.

Wright said tickets are also available at Antwine Accounting. On the day of the meal, she said, people can buy tickets at lunch and use them for the dinner.

For Wright, the event is a family affair. Her 87-year-old mother, Sue Thomas, daughter Rebecca Antwine and granddaughter Mattie Antwine are also involved in preparing the dinner.

The menu for the dinner is cabbage rolls, tabooli salad, green beans in tomato sauce, pita bread and baked kibbe, which is ground round that is ground several times to remove the fat and mixed with ground onions, soaked cracked wheat, salt, pepper and cinnamon.

Baklava, a Lebanese pastry, will be available for sale during the dinner.

Wright said cooking for the dinner began about two weeks ago.

“This weekend, we will be doing the cabbage; a couple of weeks ago, we made the kibbe,” she said. “We made 168 pans of it and we froze it. We’ll pull it out and reheat it for the dinner.”

This weekend, she said, church members will make about 13,000 cabbage rolls.

She said the dinner began as a fundraiser for the church.

“The women started cooking at their homes and coming together to serve it,” she said. “There was a small kitchen in the old church and there was no parking. There were homes on either side of the church at that time, and an A&P, I believe, on the corner of Bowmar (Avenue) and Washington Street.”

The meal, she said, is now prepared at the church’s kitchen.