From Artichoke to Habibi-san: Our Middle Eastern Thread
Before Habibi-san existed, both of its founders cooked at the same Middle Eastern restaurant on Middle Road. That is where our mezze habit comes from. The twist is that the restaurant in question does not serve Middle Eastern food any more — so the thread now runs only one way.
Before Habibi-san existed, both of the people who started it worked at the same restaurant: Artichoke, on Middle Road, more or less opposite Fortune Centre. That is where the Middle Eastern half of what we cook comes from. Jonathan Lee and Nadine Tay were both there, which is a detail HungryGoWhere noted when it reviewed us in November 2022 and which we have never really explained ourselves.
It is worth explaining now, because the restaurant at the other end of that thread has changed into something else entirely.
Where the thread starts: Middle Road, 2010
Bjorn Shen opened Artichoke in 2010, serving modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food at a time when Singapore had very little of it outside the Arab Street shophouses. It ran on that site for well over a decade. If you ate in Singapore in the 2010s and had your first properly good baba ganoush somewhere that was not a Lebanese restaurant, there is a fair chance it was there.
Two cooks passing through a kitchen is not an inheritance and we are not going to dress it up as one. But a kitchen teaches you a default, and Artichoke’s default — Middle Eastern food that did not feel like a heritage exhibit — is the one we walked out with.
What happened to it
Artichoke left Middle Road in May 2024 and moved to New Bahru, at 46 Kim Yam Road, #01-02. Then, in 2025, after fifteen years, it stopped being a Middle Eastern restaurant at all. It is now Artichoke Pizza Parlor — Shen’s own site describes it, today, as “a new school pizza parlor”. He explained the switch to HungryGoWhere like this: “It’s like we’ve been playing the same video game for 15 years. We’ve still got lives left, and it’s getting boring. So now we’re switching things up — same game, new weapon.”
This is not a eulogy. It is his restaurant, fifteen years is a long time to cook one thing, and by every account the pizza is good. But it does mean two practical things. First: if you go looking for that Middle Eastern menu on Middle Road, you are in the wrong place and about two years late — a surprising number of live listings still send people there. Second: the thread we picked up now runs in one direction only. There is no going back to the source for a refresher.
What we actually carried out of that kitchen
Not recipes. Three habits.
Mezze belongs in the middle of the table, not at the start of the meal. The Western instinct is to treat dips as an opening act you clear away before the real food. We build the table the other way round: the dips stay, everything else arrives around them, and a good meal here is mostly a bread-and-spoon operation punctuated by things off the grill.
Dips are engineered for bread, or they are just purée. Texture and salt have to be pitched at what is carrying them. Ours are built around pita that goes onto the charcoal before it reaches you.
Reverence is optional. The most useful thing we took is permission — the idea that you can cook this food seriously without pretending to be its custodian. Our drinks menu puts it as “Serious food, never a serious mood.” That posture is not original to us.
What we added: the other half
The Japanese half is the part Artichoke never had, and it is where the menu stops being homage and starts being ours. The pattern is consistent enough that once you see it you can predict it: the Middle Eastern dish keeps its structure, and the Japanese pantry supplies the seasoning layer — usually umami, sometimes acid.
- Babaganoush. Smoked eggplant, as it should be — then dressed with kinnogomadare, the golden Japanese sesame sauce, with roasted sesame, tempura crumb and togarashi.
- Chickpea hummus. Tahini made with macadamia instead of the expected sesame, finished with ikura. Salmon roe on hummus sounds like a provocation and eats like seasoning.
- Matbucha. The Moroccan stewed tomato and pepper dip, built out with kombu dashi and nori.
- Labne. Housemade strained yoghurt under smoked shimeji, taklia, garlic crisps and peppermint.
- Kibbeh nayyeh. Lamb tartare — Margra lamb — with shio kombu and a wasabi ponzu vinaigrette doing the job that lemon usually does.
- Habibi’s spanakopita. Feuille de brik around Japanese curried cream spinach.
- Lebanese charcoal chicken. Green harissa on one side, a garlic-yuzu toum on the other. Toum is the Lebanese garlic emulsion; the yuzu is the intrusion.
None of that is fusion for its own sake. Sesame is already common to both pantries; kombu and preserved lemon are doing similar work at opposite ends of Asia. We mostly look for the overlap and stand in it. If you want the ordering version of this argument rather than the historical one, we wrote that separately.
Two things we are not claiming
We are not Artichoke’s successor, and nobody has appointed us anything. Shen’s kitchen was its own thing and is now a different own thing. Ours is a much smaller room with a narrower argument.
And since Middle Eastern theming invites the question: we are not halal, and never have been. There is a Mangalica pork collar chop on the menu and a full bar behind it. That is worth one honest line rather than a coy silence.
Where the thread ends up
On a table, in the middle, with pita. Order the dips first and all at once — the babaganoush and the hummus at minimum, the labne if there are more than two of you — and let the grill catch up. The full menu is here, there are pictures of the room, and you can book a table when you want to test the theory.
For the rest of the backstory: the five-year timeline covers what happened after 2020, Nadine’s route into the kitchen covers how the cooking got here, and the move to Hamilton Road covers why we now have a charcoal grill big enough to justify all this.