Habibi's Brussel Sprouts, Explained

Our menu prints it like this: Habibi’s Brussel Sprouts — kinnogomadare, red cabbage pickles, jalapenos, shredded bonito. Four things and a spelling mistake.

It is the dish named more than any other in everything written about us, across two addresses and five years of changing almost everything else. We have already published what reviewers keep ordering, which is the roundup. This is the other half of the job: what is actually on the plate, why those four things are on it together, and how to order it so it lands the way it is meant to.

The four things on the plate

The sprouts. Halved, and taken hard over charcoal until the cut faces go dark and the outer leaves go crisp and slightly bitter. This is the whole argument of the dish. A Brussels sprout that has been boiled or steamed is the vegetable everybody’s childhood ruined. A Brussels sprout that has been burnt on purpose is a different ingredient: sweeter in the middle, savoury at the edges, with the sulphurous note that gives the vegetable its bad name largely cooked off.

Kinnogomadare. The golden sesame sauce that our kitchen puts on this dish and on the babaganoush. It is a roasted sesame sauce in the Japanese goma dare family — nutty, creamy, faintly sweet, salty from soy. It is the fat and the comfort in the dish, and it is doing the work that a brown butter would do in a French version. We wrote it its own piece: what kinnogomadare actually is.

Red cabbage pickles. Sharp, magenta, and the reason the plate does not become heavy. Charred vegetable plus sesame sauce is rich; without an acid it goes one-note in about four bites. The pickles reset the palate every time you hit one.

Jalapenos. Green heat, low on the scale, more brightness than burn. They are there for lift rather than for a challenge — nobody has ever sent this dish back for being too spicy.

Shredded bonito. Dried, fermented, smoked skipjack tuna, shaved into paper-thin flakes. On a hot plate the flakes lift and curl in the rising heat, which is the bit of theatre everybody films. The flavour job is deeper than the trick: bonito is concentrated umami and a second layer of smoke, and it ties a Japanese pantry to a vegetable that arrived here through a Middle Eastern kitchen.

Why sesame instead of butter

Charred brassicas want fat and they want salt. Most Western kitchens reach for butter, bacon or a hard cheese. All three work, and all three make the dish heavier — and heavier is not what you want from the plate that lands third at a table that still has a lamb rump coming.

Sesame does the same structural job with a completely different weight. It carries salt and umami, it coats without greasing, and it has its own toasted bitterness that sits alongside the char rather than covering it. Then the pickles cut, the jalapeno lifts, and the bonito adds smoke on top of smoke. Four ingredients, four different jobs, no passengers. That is the reason it is on the menu, and honestly it is also the reason it survived the move from Haji Lane when a lot of dishes did not — we have told the story of that move elsewhere.

No, it is not vegetarian

This comes up at the table most nights, so here it is in writing: bonito is fish. The dish reads as a vegetable side and it is not a vegetarian one. The sesame sauce is also not a dairy-free proposition to assume your way into.

We would rather say that plainly here than have you find out halfway through. If you are ordering for a table with a vegetarian at it, talk to the floor when you sit down — the menu carries its own line about telling us your dietary restrictions, and it is not decoration. There are things we can do; there are also things we would rather not fake.

One L, and why we have not fixed it

The vegetable is named after Brussels. Our menu says Brussel. It has said Brussel since the first version of this dish, it is printed that way at both addresses, and at this point correcting it would feel like a stranger tidying your kitchen.

We mention it because search engines are literal and so are people reading a menu photo on Instagram. If you have been looking for the sprouts and could not find the post, that missing L is probably why. It also fits the house line printed on the front of our drinks list: serious food, never a serious mood.

How to order it, and what to order around it

Two things we would say if you asked us across the pass.

First: order it early. It is best in the first ninety seconds off the fire, while the bonito is still moving and the crisp leaves are still crisp. It is not a dish to park at the edge of the table while you finish something else.

Second: do not order it alone. It is built to sit against something rich, not to carry a course by itself. The pairings that work hardest are the dips — the chickpea hummus with macadamia tahini and ikura and the cassava and taramasalata — because they are soft and cool where the sprouts are hot and crunchy. If you want the whole ordering method rather than one dish at a time, we set it out in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern table, and the full list is on the menu.

Two more things off the same fire, if you are building a table around this: the fire-tossed edamame, which is the other charred vegetable and answers the char with fermented sweetness instead of sesame, and the Mangalica pork collar if somebody at the table wants a main to anchor it all.

The Li’l Habibi version is a different plate

Our Haji Lane sibling runs its own version. Its menu calls them Roasted Brussel Sprouts and lists the same four supporting ingredients — kinnogomadare, red cabbage pickles, jalapenos, bonito — but it is a different kitchen, a different fire, and a smaller room built around skewers. Order it there if you are already there; do not treat the two as interchangeable. Li’l Habibi is at 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm.

Where to eat the original

The Hamilton Road version is the one the reviews are about. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar — Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. There are pictures of the room and the grill in the gallery, and the story of how a five-year-old restaurant ended up here is in five years of Habibi-san.

If you are coming for the sprouts, book a table. They are the first thing we would put in front of you.