From Haji Lane to Hamilton Road: Why We Built Habibi-san a New Home

If you look us up, there is a decent chance you will be sent to the wrong address. Plenty of listings, review pages and old write-ups still put Habibi-san at 55 Haji Lane, which is where we started and is no longer where we are. So this is the record, set down by us, because as far as we can tell nobody else has bothered to write it.

Habibi-san opened in December 2020 at 55 Haji Lane. Since October 2025 the restaurant has been at 29 Hamilton Road, in Jalan Besar. Haji Lane is still ours — it is now Li’l Habibi, which is a different thing on purpose. Here is how that happened and why.

Starting on Haji Lane, in December 2020

December 2020 was not a sensible month to open a restaurant in Singapore, or anywhere. Jonathan Lee and Nadine Tay did it anyway, both coming out of Artichoke, both carrying a fondness for Middle Eastern cooking that Singapore had mostly filed under kebab shops and nothing else.

The idea was not complicated, though it sounded odd out loud: run a Japanese izakaya format — small plates, drinks first, no ceremony — and cook Middle Eastern food inside it. Hummus and babaganoush next to ikura and ponzu. That is where the name came from, and we have written the full explanation of it in what “Habibi-san” actually means.

Haji Lane suited that. It is a narrow street of shophouses that has never taken itself seriously, and a restaurant that put tahini and mentaiko on the same table did not need to explain itself there. In 2022 Nadine was named Rising Female Chef of the Year at the World Gourmet Awards — the one award we cite, because it is the one that is real.

Why we moved

The honest answer is the fire.

Everything we do well comes off charcoal. The Lebanese chicken that sits over the grill for 45 minutes. The pork collar. The wagyu karubi. The pita that gets its blisters directly over the flame. A charcoal kitchen wants space, extraction and a grill you can stand at all night, and a shophouse unit on Haji Lane can only give you so much of any of those.

You can either make the food fit the room, or find a room that fits the food. We went looking for the second one.

29 Hamilton Road is that room. It sits in Jalan Besar, a short walk from Lavender MRT, on a quiet street that mostly does not announce itself. The grill is the centre of the kitchen rather than something squeezed in beside it. You can see the whole thing working from the room, which we wanted — the gallery gives a better sense of it than a paragraph will.

It also gave us daylight hours. Brunch runs at Hamilton Road on Saturdays and Sundays, 11am to 2.30pm, and it has turned into one of our favourite shifts of the week — the Haji Lane address does not open before evening at all these days.

What stayed on Haji Lane

Not a closure and not a ghost of the old place. Li’l Habibi is a kushiyaki counter — skewers over charcoal — living inside Bar Stories at 55 Haji Lane, and its menu describes it better than we could: “a Middle Eastern–Japanese izakaya that loves a good charcoal flirt.”

The two menus deliberately do not overlap much. Hamilton Road is a mezze-and-mains restaurant. Haji Lane is skewers: chicken hearts with preserved lemon kosho, Iberico pork jowl twice cooked with fennel spice, beef chuck with red harissa and ramen chilli, mortadella with pork ragu and toasted pistachios. There is a short mezze list, a set called GIMME ALL!!! that the menu cheerfully says feeds two to three “but definitely not 4”, and a Feed Me omakase for two or more.

The practical difference that catches people out: Li’l Habibi is evenings only, Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm. It is not a café and it does not do daytime. If you are planning a Haji Lane afternoon, our Haji Lane food guide covers what is actually open before the sun goes down.

What we kept, and what we changed

Kept: the format. Small plates, shared, drinks arriving before food, no procession of courses. That is the izakaya bit, and it is the part people most often mistake for casualness — we make the argument at length in what makes an izakaya authentic.

Kept: the tone. Our drinks menu still carries the line “Serious food, never a serious mood,” which is about as close to a mission statement as we get.

Changed: the range. A bigger kitchen meant dishes that were not practical before — the long-cooked chicken, the larger cuts, the wood-smoked things. It meant brunch. It meant a cellar with room for oddities, including three Macedonian reds and three Macedonian whites, which almost nobody in Singapore pours and which we will defend at length to anyone who asks.

Changed, and worth saying plainly: we are not the cheap little place on Haji Lane any more. A charcoal restaurant with that kind of kitchen costs what it costs. Li’l Habibi is the lighter, smaller-spend way in, and we have been straightforward about that in our look at affordable Japanese food in Singapore.

Two addresses, one kitchen’s thinking

So, for the record, and for the listings that still have it wrong:

Habibi-san — 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198. Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm. Brunch Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 2.30pm. The menu is here and you can book a table here.

Li’l Habibi — 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, inside Bar Stories. Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm.

One more thing worth flagging, since the name causes confusion: there is an unrelated business in Singapore that also trades on “Habibi”. We are Habibi-san, at Hamilton Road, and Li’l Habibi, at Haji Lane. That is the whole family.

If you want the rest of the story around this move: the five-year timeline sets out what happened between December 2020 and now with the dates attached, our Middle Eastern thread explains where half of this menu came from before either address existed, and the route our head chef took into the kitchen explains who has been cooking it the whole time.

The practical consequence of all this, if you are simply trying to find us: the MRT stations, the buses, the parking and the booking routes for both rooms are set out in getting to Habibi-san.

Five years on, we know this neighbourhood well enough to write it down. If you want to know what else is worth eating within a few minutes of our door, we have published a Jalan Besar food guide — every address and set of hours checked against the venue’s own website — and a Lavender food guide for anyone arriving on the East-West Line instead.