Five Years of Habibi-san: A 2020

In December 2020 we opened a Middle Eastern izakaya in a Haji Lane shophouse. We were open five nights a week, we shared the building with a cocktail bar, and you booked through somebody else’s website. Five years later we cook over charcoal on Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar, and the Haji Lane room has a different name over the door.

Restaurants rarely write this down. Press coverage captures a moment and then moves on, so the record of a place ends up scattered across launch write-ups and reviews that nobody stitches together. This is our stitch — dated, sourced where the source is somebody else’s, and honest about the parts that did not go well.

December 2020 — 55 Haji Lane, five nights a week

We opened at 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, in the back half of December 2020. SETHLUI.com’s write-up, updated 22 December 2020, has the details we would otherwise have lost: opening hours of 5.30pm to 10.30pm, Tuesday to Saturday, closed Monday and Sunday. We describe ourselves in that piece as “an alternative Middle Eastern izakaya” — which is, five years and one address later, still the sentence we would use.

The room was shared with Bar Stories, the cocktail bar upstairs at the same address, and reservations ran through their site. That arrangement was not a stopgap. It is still how the Haji Lane operation works today, which is unusual enough that it is worth saying plainly rather than skating over it.

The launch menu, as recorded in that same December 2020 article: Roasted Brussel Sprouts, a New Zealand line-caught snapper sarma, Fremantle octopus, a “Namastyle” chocolate tart, truffle brie, and a chef’s-choice omakase called Feeeeed Me!, minimum two guests. Hold that list; we will come back to it.

2022 — the year the sprouts became the signature

Two things happened in 2022, and only one of them was an award.

The first: HungryGoWhere reviewed us on 11 November 2022 and called the roasted Brussels sprouts “life-changing”, describing them as caramelised to perfection under sesame dressing, pickled red cabbage, jalapeños and bonito. The same review called our mentaiko taramasalata “marvellously executed”. Nearly four years on, those two dishes are still the ones people order before they have finished sitting down, and the sprouts are still on the menu — spelled “Habibi’s Brussel Sprouts”, one L, which is our typo and now our tradition.

The second thing that happened in 2022 was that Nadine Tay was named Rising Female Chef of the Year. That remains the only award this restaurant has ever won, and we would rather say so directly than let a vaguer sentence do the work.

We should be even-handed about that review, because it was not a rave throughout. It found the Fremantle octopus underwhelming in presentation, and it dismissed both desserts — the chocolate tart described as “ordinary — almost pedestrian”. We did not enjoy reading that. It was also fair, and it is the reason for something further down this page.

January 2024 — a philosophy goes on the record

The Beat Asia profiled Nadine in January 2024. It is the only place where the kitchen’s operating principle has been stated publicly in her own words: “My culinary philosophy is producing flavourful food at minimal wastage. Use every ingredient and stretch its benefits to the maximum.”

The same interview contains the least pretentious description of our menu that anyone has managed, including us: “We serve food that we ourselves enjoy eating.”

October 2025 — Hamilton Road

In October 2025 we opened the flagship at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, a few minutes from Lavender MRT. It gave the kitchen something the shophouse could not: a full charcoal grill built into the pass, a dining room of our own, and enough capacity to run a weekend brunch service.

Haji Lane did not close. It became Li’l Habibi, a kushiyaki-led little sibling still at 55 Haji Lane, still with Bar Stories pouring the drinks. Why we moved rather than expanded, and what we deliberately left behind, is a longer argument than this timeline can hold — it is its own post.

2026 — where the two rooms stand

Hamilton Road serves dinner Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, plus brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. We are closed Mondays. Li’l Habibi runs Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm — evenings only, so it is not the answer to a Haji Lane afternoon, whatever the guides say. If you want the street in daylight, the Haji Lane food guide is more use.

The name has been explained badly in a lot of places over five years, so we wrote that down too.

What survived five years, and what did not

Go back to that December 2020 list. Four of those items are still with us in some form: the Brussels sprouts, the Fremantle octopus, the chickpea hummus, and the Feeeeed Me! omakase. The New Zealand snapper sarma and the truffle brie are gone, and have been for long enough that we had to check the old article to remember them.

The desserts are the interesting case. The chocolate tart that got called pedestrian in 2022 is not on the menu any more. What replaced it — muhallebi with yamasa soy caramel and morello cherries, a chocolate kataifi tart built on Valrhona 66%, and a matcha-misu made with matcha sake — was a deliberate rebuild of the weakest part of the menu. We are not going to claim the new ones are celebrated, because nobody has said so in print. We are saying the criticism landed and we did something about it. You can read the current lineup on the menu.

One number, strictly as history: that Feeeeed Me! omakase was listed at S$58 a head in December 2020. That figure belongs to 2020 and a different address — it is not today’s price, and our current food menu does not print prices at all, so we will not invent one here.

The through-line

Two of the strands in this timeline are long enough to have posts of their own: where the Middle Eastern half of the cooking came from is a story about a restaurant that no longer serves it, and what the charcoal actually demands of the people running it is a separate argument entirely.

Five years, two addresses, one argument: cook Middle Eastern food over Japanese charcoal and take neither tradition too seriously. The room changed, the grill got bigger, the desserts got fixed. The Brussels sprouts never moved. There are pictures of most of it, and if you would rather taste the timeline than read it, book a table — or start with what we mean by an izakaya in the first place.

Four more pieces of the practical record sit alongside this timeline: what reviewers keep ordering, read back across five years of write-ups; the questions people ask before booking, answered plainly; what dinner with us actually costs, with the arithmetic we can prove; and how to get to either room.

One more from the six-day week: we have also written up why we close on Mondays — the honest arithmetic of eight services in six days, which nights are easiest to book, and the discovery that half our neighbours on Jalan Besar take the same day off.

And a new strand, added in August 2026: the dishes themselves, one at a time. We have taken apart Habibi’s Brussel sprouts, the most-named dish on the menu; explained kinnogomadare, the golden sesame sauce that turns up on the sprouts and the babaganoush; traced two roe traditions meeting in one dip; and written up the hummus with macadamia tahini, home version included.

That strand has kept going. There is now the babaganoush, on what a charcoal fire actually does to a whole eggplant and why the Haji Lane version swaps the tempura for chicken skin; the Mangalica pork collar, on a Hungarian pig bred to be fat and what a tonkotsu jus is doing on a menu that looks Middle Eastern; the kibbeh nayyeh, which answers the raw-meat question straight rather than dressing it up; and the fire-tossed edamame, which is a small argument about why the seasoning goes on the part of the pod you throw away.

The dish strand now runs through the mezze board itself: the matbucha, the one dip we stew rather than blitz, and what a kelp stock is doing in a Moroccan tomato salad; the labne, on strained yoghurt, taklia and why the mushrooms go through smoke first; Habibi’s spanakopita, which manages to be Greek, Tunisian and Japanese in a single line of menu; and the Atlantic seabass, where the menu promises crisp skin in writing and then has to keep the promise.

The strand now reaches the end of the meal, and the small salty thing that starts it: the muhallebi, which is honest about desserts having been the part reviewers used to skip, and about what soy caramel does that salted caramel cannot; the chocolate kataifi tart, on why a pastry made of threads rather than sheets decides the filling that goes on it; the matcha-misu, which keeps the coffee most matcha tiramisus throw away and runs on a sake that turns up three times on one menu; and the smoked olives, where the oil in the bowl turns out to be the whole point.

And the spice shelf: sumac, the sour red berry that goes into the pastry cream on Li’l Habibi’s fruit tart, and has a longer history than anything else in the cupboard. And from the fridge: burrata, the Puglian cheese on our small plates that was, by one account, invented to stop leftover curd going to waste. And from the pepper mill: the Cambodian black pepper on the kibbeh nayyeh — and Cambodian, it turns out, does not automatically mean Kampot.