Habibi’s Spanakopita: a Greek Pie in Tunisian Pastry with Japanese Curry

Most of our menu is a two-country conversation. This one is three, and it manages it in a single line: japanese curried cream spinach, fuille de brik. A Greek pie name, a North African pastry, and a sauce that came to Japan by way of the British navy.

It sounds like a dare. It is actually the most technically conservative dish on the mezze list, because every substitution in it has a structural reason behind it rather than a novel one.

What spanakopita normally is

Spanakopita is a Greek spinach pie. Spinach, usually feta, usually dill or spring onion, wrapped or layered in filo and baked in a tray, then cut into squares or coiled and cut into wedges. It is picnic food, bakery-counter food, home food. Nobody in Greece treats it as a restaurant showpiece, and that plainness is the point of the reference: everybody knows roughly what the word promises.

What it promises is a crisp shell around a savoury green filling. Keep that promise and you can change almost everything else, which is what happened here.

Brik pastry is not filo

Filo is a stack. You lay down many paper-thin sheets, brush fat between them, and the layers separate in the oven into something that shatters. The texture is a consequence of the stacking, not of any one sheet.

Feuille de brik is a single sheet. It is the North African pastry known as malsouka in Tunisia and warqa in Morocco, made by dabbing a wet dough onto a hot plate until a thin round sets, then peeling it off. It is what a Tunisian brik is wrapped in — the fried parcel with a whole egg inside that stays runny.

The two behave differently and fail differently. Filo dries out and goes brittle if it sits, and it needs enough fat and enough layers to work at all. A brik sheet is stronger and less fussy, and when it meets serious heat it blisters and crackles rather than flaking apart. For something that has to leave a kitchen hot and reach a table across a room still crisp, that is the more reliable pastry. It also fries beautifully, which filo only sometimes does.

So the swap is not a flourish. It is the pastry that survives the walk across a room, which is the question a restaurant kitchen has to answer and a home kitchen does not.

One E, and what the menu prints

Our menu prints fuille de brik. The pastry is feuille de brik — French for brik leaf. There is an E missing and we are not going to pretend it is a stylistic choice.

We mention it for the same reason we own up to the single L in our Brussel sprouts: menus get photographed and search engines are literal, and if you have gone looking for this dish and found nothing, a missing letter is the likeliest reason. Order it as Habibi’s Spanakopita and everyone will know what you mean.

Japanese curry is the third country

Japanese curry is not a relative of the Indian or Thai curries most people picture. It is a roux — fat and flour cooked together, then spiced — which makes it a thick, mellow, faintly sweet gravy rather than a spice-forward sauce. The usual account of how it got there is that curry reached Japan through the British navy in the nineteenth century, arriving as a British stew-with-curry-powder rather than anything from the subcontinent, and Japanese kitchens then made it entirely their own.

That history is the reason it works here. A roux-based curry is engineered to be a binding sauce. It is not trying to be hot, and it is not trying to be the loudest thing on the plate. It has body, gentle spice, and enough salt and savouriness to season a vegetable that does not season itself.

Why the spinach is creamed, and why that is structural

Spinach is a nightmare inside pastry. It is almost all water, it collapses to a fraction of its volume, and everything it releases has to go somewhere. A wet filling steams a pastry case from the inside, and steamed pastry is soggy pastry — the one outcome this dish cannot survive.

A curry roux fixes that at the source. Flour and fat bind free liquid, so the filling holds together as a mass rather than weeping into the shell. Creamed spinach is the same idea arrived at from the French side, and putting the two together gives you a filling thick enough to spoon and stable enough to wrap.

This is the part we would defend hardest if somebody called the dish a gimmick. The Japanese element is not sitting on top as a signature. It is the thing holding the pie shut.

What happened to the feta

In the Greek original, feta does two jobs: salt and sourness. Take it out and a spinach pie goes flat very quickly.

Our menu names no cheese in this dish. The savoury weight comes from the curry instead — its salt, its spice, and the depth a cooked roux carries. It is a different flavour from the sharp lactic hit of feta, warmer and rounder, and it is the reason the dish tastes like a comfort item rather than a bright one. If you want the sharp version of that sensation on the same table, that is what the labne is for.

How to order it

Immediately, and hot. This is the single most time-sensitive thing in the mezze section. Pastry that has been sitting on a table for six minutes while everyone talks is a worse dish than the same pastry two minutes out of the kitchen, and no kitchen can fix that from its side.

Order it against something cold and sharp. Hot crisp pastry with a rich filling wants an acidic neighbour — the matbucha is warm and acidic, the hummus is cool and dense, and either one changes how the second half of the pie eats.

It is the pastry item on a board where nearly everything else is a dip, so it is also the thing to order if you want a mezze course with some structure to it rather than five bowls and bread. On dietary questions, ask us at the table rather than reading assumptions off a menu line — that goes for this dish in particular, and there is more of it in our FAQ. For the whole ordering method, we set it out in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern table.

Where to eat it

Hamilton Road only — it is not on the list at Li’l Habibi, whose kitchen is built around skewers. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm.

The full mezze section is on the menu, the room is in the gallery, and the story of how a restaurant ends up putting Japanese curry inside Tunisian pastry and calling it Greek is, more or less, five years of Habibi-san.

Book a table and order it first.