Japanese-Middle Eastern Fusion: How It Fits

Put “Japanese” and “Middle Eastern” on the same sign and most people hear a gimmick. Two cuisines from opposite ends of Asia, one built on restraint and raw fish, the other on garlic and long braises — picked, apparently, because the combination had not been done yet.

That is not why it works, and after five years of cooking it we can be specific about why it does. The two traditions overlap in three places and fail to overlap in a fourth, and every honest decision on our menu comes from knowing which is which. This post is the structural argument. If you want the venue-by-venue view of who else is doing this in Singapore, that is the fusion restaurants guide; if you want the philosophical question of whether fusion can be authentic at all, we have given that its own post rather than smuggle it in here.

Both of them are charcoal cuisines

Start with the thing nobody puts in the marketing, because it is the strongest link of the four.

Japanese grilling — yakitori, kushiyaki, robatayaki, sumibiyaki — is a tradition of cooking small pieces of protein over live coals and serving them with a sharp condiment and something starchy alongside. So is the Levantine and wider Middle Eastern grill: the mangal, the skewer, the whole bird flattened over fire, the pile of flatbread, the acid and the pickles on the side to cut it.

These are not similar in flavour. They are similar in architecture. Same fuel, same portioning logic, same job for the bread, same insistence that grilled meat needs something sour next to it. A kitchen that can run one can run the other on the same equipment, and a diner who knows one already knows how to eat the other.

That is a much better reason to combine two cuisines than novelty, and it is the reason the grill section of our menu does not feel like two menus stapled together. Our Lebanese charcoal chicken and a yakitori counter are doing the same thing with different seasoning. What charcoal is actually doing to the food — and why fire is not simply a hotter pan — is its own subject.

The acid slot: yuzu is a substitution, not an addition

Both cuisines season heavily with acid, and this is where the swaps become almost mechanical.

Levantine cooking runs on lemon, sumac, vinegar and pickles. Japanese cooking runs on citrus, rice vinegar, ponzu and a large family of vinegared and pickled things. Two different fruits, one identical job: cutting fat, resetting the palate between rich mouthfuls, and making a grilled thing taste lighter than it is.

Which means a Japanese acid can step into a Middle Eastern recipe without displacing anything. The clearest case on our menu is the garlic-yuzu toum served with the charcoal chicken. Classic toum is garlic, oil, salt and lemon juice. We use yuzu. Nothing has been bolted on — the recipe already had an acid slot and we put a different citrus in it. The sauce is structurally unchanged.

The same move runs down the rest of the menu. The lamb tartare gets a wasabi ponzu vinaigrette where a Levantine kitchen would reach for lemon. The salmon salata gets an orange-wafu vinaigrette. The pork collar comes with charred vinegared radicchio; the ribeye and the wagyu karubi both get a truffle ponzu jus; the lamb rump arrives with a ginger tzatziki. Read the menu with acid in mind and you will find it in nearly every line, from both halves of the pantry, doing exactly the same work.

What Japan brings that the Levant does not have

Here the two are genuinely unequal, and the honest word for what Japan contributes is umami.

Middle Eastern cooking builds savour mostly out of alliums, spice, smoke and long cooking. Japanese cooking has an enormous cured, dried and fermented pantry — kombu, bonito, miso, roe, koji, soy — whose entire purpose is to add depth without adding weight. That pantry has no direct Levantine equivalent, and it is the most useful thing either side brings to the other.

The way to see it is to notice where it lands. Across our mezze section, every Japanese ingredient is a savoury one: kombu dashi and nori in the matbucha, kinnogomadare and togarashi on the babaganoush, shiro miso in the edamame, smoked shimeji on the labne, mentaiko XO and tobiko on the cassava, ikura on the hummus. Not one of them is a novelty flavour. They are all sitting underneath a Levantine dish making it taste more of itself. We made that argument at dish level in the mezze board guide; the point here is that it generalises.

It runs into the big plates too. Shio kombu in the lamb tartare. Shredded bonito on the Brussel sprouts. A tonkotsu jus with the Mangalica pork collar. In every case the Japanese element is a seasoning layer, not a headline.

Where the two cuisines genuinely do not meet: dairy

Now the failure, because a menu that only tells you what fits is selling you something.

Middle Eastern cooking is a dairy cuisine, specifically a cultured dairy cuisine. Yoghurt, strained yoghurt, soft cheeses, whey — sharp, sour, cooling, used as a component rather than a garnish. Our labne is strained in-house. The lamb rump comes with tzatziki. Dessert is a milk pudding.

Traditional Japanese cooking has essentially none of this. There is no yoghurt in the tradition, no cheese, no sour cream. It is not a gap that can be filled with a clever substitution the way lemon was filled with yuzu, because there is nothing on the Japanese side to substitute with.

So on any dish where dairy matters, one cuisine has to lead and the other has to accept a supporting role. The labne is a Levantine dish with a Japanese garnish on top, and it should be read that way. Nobody has met in the middle there, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this blog tries not to make.

The third cuisine nobody puts on the sign

Which brings us to the thing that is easiest to miss and hardest to argue with.

Read our menu closely and a third tradition is quietly holding the other two together, and it is French. The seabass comes with a yuzu beurre blanc and miso butter. The matbucha is finished with browned butter. The edamame is tossed in confit garlic butter. The spanakopita is filled with a curried cream. There is burrata on the small plates and a soy caramel on the muhallebi.

Every one of those is a European butter-and-cream technique. Japanese cooking did not supply them and neither did Beirut. They are there because they work, and because the classical French toolkit is what most professional kitchens are actually trained in, ours included.

We think saying so out loud makes the menu easier to read, not harder. “Japanese-Middle Eastern” describes where the ingredients and the ideas come from. The technique underneath a good third of the plates is French, and a kitchen that hid that would be telling you a tidier story than the food.

What all of this means when you order

Four practical consequences, in the order they matter at the table.

Order across the fire, not around it. The grill is the part of the menu where the two traditions are doing the same job, so it is the part where the fusion is most seamless. If you order one grilled thing all night you have missed the argument.
Expect the Japanese elements to be quiet. If you are hunting for a dish that tastes obviously Japanese, you will conclude the fusion is timid. It is not timid; it is structural. The kombu and the bonito are doing their work below the level where you would name them.
Let the acid pace the meal. Nearly every plate carries its own sourness. That is what makes a long table of rich, smoky food survive two hours, and it is why the sequence matters less here than at a menu built on stocks and reductions.
Treat the dairy dishes as Levantine dishes. The labne, the tzatziki, the muhallebi — these have a Japanese accent, not a Japanese spine. Order them for what they are.

If you want that translated into an actual order for a first visit, we wrote the ordering guide separately, and if you would rather hand the decision over entirely, FEEEEED ME! is how that works. For the wider map of Japanese dining in Singapore that this sits inside, start with the full guide, and for the dish-level version of “what is worth knowing”, there is Beyond Sushi.

Where we sit, plainly

Habibi-san is at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar, open Tuesday to Sunday 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. We serve pork and we serve alcohol, so we are not halal — that and the other practical questions are answered in our FAQ. The menu asks you to tell us about dietary restrictions and food allergies, and that request is genuine rather than decorative, because a fusion menu hides allergens in places a single-cuisine menu does not.

You can read the full menu before you come, look at the room and the grill, and book a table when you have decided which half of the sign you want to lead with.