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Most date dinners are dull because of the format, not the food. Six Singapore restaurants where the meal gives you something to do — each address checked against the restaurant's own website this week.
Every drink at Li'l Habibi comes from Bar Stories, a Haji Lane bar that does not print a cocktail list. Here is how ordering actually works, and what to say when there is nothing to point at.
Whole-animal cuts, sauces that work three shifts, twice-cooking, and a set of scales. A prep-level look at what "use every ingredient" actually looks like on our menu.
"Fun dining, not fine dining" is the line we put on our own About page. Here is what it commits us to, what it does not excuse, and where you can hear it in the menu.
Charcoal has a macho mythology attached to it, and with it an assumption about who belongs in front of one. It is the wrong test. Fire cooking is a judgement job with a physical tax, not a strength contest — and the difference matters more than the mythology does.
She did not start in a kitchen. She started carrying plates out of one, part-time, as a student — and spent the next decade working her way back in. The route Nadine Tay took to a charcoal grill on Hamilton Road, with the dates and the sources attached.
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.
December 2020: a Middle Eastern izakaya opens in a Haji Lane shophouse, five nights a week, sharing a roof with a cocktail bar. Five years later we are cooking over charcoal on Hamilton Road. Here is the timeline with the dates attached — and an honest account of which dishes made it through and which quietly did not.
Habibi is Arabic for my beloved. -San is the Japanese honorific that also gets attached to shops and trades. Why we put them together, and how to say it.
We opened at 55 Haji Lane in December 2020 and moved to 29 Hamilton Road in October 2025. Why we moved, what stayed behind as Li Habibi, and what changed on the menu.