Japanese Food Around Bugis and Kampong Glam

There is good Japanese food around Bugis and Kampong Glam. There is also an unusual amount of bad information about it, because this is one of the fastest-churning stretches of F&B in Singapore and the guides that cover it are mostly older than they look.

We have a stake in this patch — Li’l Habibi, our kushiyaki and mezze counter, is at 55 Haji Lane, right in the middle of it. Everything below was checked on the venue’s own website on 27 August 2026, and several well-known names did not survive that check. We say which, and why, rather than quietly dropping them.

First, “Bugis” is five different places

Half the confusion here is geographic. “Bugis” might mean any of these, and they are a genuine walk apart:

• Bugis Junction — the glass-roofed mall on Victoria Street, directly on the MRT.
• Bugis+ — the mall across Victoria Street, joined by a link bridge, restaurants stacked upstairs.
• Bugis Village — the low shophouse rows on Rochor Road, a different kind of eating entirely.
• North Bridge Road — the spine from Odeon Towers past the mosque, quietly holding more of the area’s interesting counters than either mall.
• Kampong Glam proper — Arab Street, Bussorah Street, Haji Lane and Bali Lane, where the evening happens. For Japanese food specifically, the options worth sending you to are evening ones. The street itself does eat lunch, at the Haji Lane cafes and at the nasi padang and Lebanese rooms around Sultan Mosque. (Corrected 9 October 2026: this line used to say almost nothing here opens for lunch, which our own guides to those two show is not true.)

That last point catches people out: Kampong Glam’s food is largely an evening proposition, the malls a midday one.

Where we would actually send you

Ramen on Rochor Road

Ramen Keisuke’s Tonkotsu King Four Seasons sits at 158 Rochor Road, in what the group’s own site calls Bugis Village. Its published hours are 11.30am to 2.30pm and 5pm to 10.30pm on weekdays, and 11.30am to 10pm at weekends and on public holidays — note that the weekday service closes for the afternoon and the weekend one does not.

The reason a single-item ramen shop is a sound bet in a mall district is structural rather than sentimental: a kitchen doing one thing all day is a kitchen making that thing to order, because there is nothing else on the line. It is the same logic that runs through our guide to eating Japanese cheaply in Singapore.

A rice bowl inside Bugis+

Scrambled Egg Rice Keisuke is on the fourth floor of Bugis+, at 201 Victoria Street #04-01. It runs noon to 3pm and 5pm to 9.30pm on weekdays, and noon straight through to 9.30pm at weekends and public holidays.

It is worth knowing this exists because it solves the specific Bugis problem of wanting something quick, hot and made to order inside a mall without joining a queue that stretches past a shopfront. The concept is one dish, and the shop is named after it, which is generally the strongest signal a menu can send.

Tea and dessert on North Bridge Road — but check which counter

Hvala has two counters on North Bridge Road at opposite ends of the same street, and they keep completely different hours. The Odeon 333 flagship at 333 North Bridge Road, #01-11, Singapore 188720, is open 11am to 8.30pm Sunday to Friday and noon to 9.30pm on Saturday. The counter at Raffles Specialist Centre, 585 North Bridge Road, #01-01, closes at 7pm and opens at 9am, daily.

That second one is the reason we bothered to read their own page instead of a listing. Third-party pages for the 585 address circulate hours running to 9.30pm at night. The tea house’s own site says it shuts at seven. It is a good reminder that a Japanese tea counter is a daytime business in a neighbourhood most people arrive at after dark.

Skewers on Haji Lane after dark — and yes, this one is us

Li’l Habibi is at 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, open Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm to 10.30pm. It is our Kampong Glam venue and the little sibling to our Hamilton Road restaurant, and we are not going to pretend to be a neutral party about it.

What it is, honestly: a Middle Eastern-Japanese counter that runs charcoal skewers alongside mezze, in a room shared with a cocktail bar. The menu prints its prices, which is not universal around here — kushiyaki skewers start at 9 each for chicken hearts with preserved lemon kosho, beef chuck with red harissa is 14, and the whole skewer selection as one order is 50, described on the menu itself as feeding “1 greedy person”. The mezze platter is 35 and says “Feeds 2-3, but definitely not 4”. The chef’s-choice menu is 72 a head with a two-person minimum. Ten per cent service and nine per cent GST on top.

Two things to know before you come: it opens at 5.30pm and not before, so it cannot be your Kampong Glam lunch, and we serve pork and alcohol at both our venues, so we are not a halal restaurant and never present ourselves as one. If the skewer format is what interests you rather than the address, we wrote about why cooking on a stick works at all.

What came off this list, and why

A longer draft had eight names on it. What happened to the missing four is more useful than the list.

A Bussorah Street izakaya. Haráru Izakaya, at 16 Bussorah Street, is on essentially every guide to this neighbourhood, and its own domain does not resolve. That is not a one-day glitch: as of 5 September 2026 we have tried the bare host, the www host and a full browser on four separate occasions since late August, and every attempt failed. We are still not declaring the restaurant closed — plenty of trading restaurants have quietly let a website lapse — but we will not publish an address and hours we cannot read from the business itself. If you want to go, phone ahead.

A much-photographed café off Jalan Klapa. Still listed as open on several live guides. At least one major listings source now carries it as closed, and we could find no working first-party page. We have left it out rather than repeat either claim as fact.

A chain everyone assumes is in Bugis Junction. Ichiban Boshi’s own website lists sixteen Singapore outlets today and none of them is at Bugis Junction, although plenty of third-party listings place one there. Its site publishes no addresses or opening hours at all, which makes it impossible to check any further.

A ramen strip that has moved on. Liang Seah Street has a long-standing reputation as the Japanese row at Bugis. Keisuke’s own outlet page no longer carries a Liang Seah Street address, though a great many pages still say it does.

None of that means the area is thin. It means the published map of it is out of date, which is exactly why the rule we work to is that an address only goes in a post of ours if it came off the venue’s own site the day we wrote it.

Getting around, and timing it

Bugis MRT sits on the East-West and Downtown lines and puts you between the two malls. From the station exit onto Victoria Street, Bugis+ is across the road, Bugis Village is a few minutes up Rochor Road, and Kampong Glam is a walk of roughly ten minutes through Arab Street or along North Bridge Road.

The sequence that works: mall or Rochor Road for lunch, North Bridge Road in the afternoon while the tea counters are still open, Kampong Glam from about six. Do it the other way round and you will find the daytime places shut and the evening ones not yet open.

The Jalan Besar footnote

One stop further out, our main restaurant sits at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar — close enough that people routinely treat the two neighbourhoods as one evening, and different enough to be worth the trip. That side is a full charcoal-grill dinner rather than a counter of skewers; the Jalan Besar guide covers the street itself.

For the wider Kampong Glam picture beyond Japanese food, our Haji Lane food guide and the bars piece do that ground properly, and the full Japanese food guide is the map of the city as a whole. Our Hamilton Road menu is here if you want to compare the two kitchens.

Otherwise: come to Haji Lane in the evening, or book Hamilton Road for the longer version.