Lebanese Charcoal Chicken: Why It Has a Cult Following

We have already written about why we put a whole chicken over the coals for 45 minutes, which is a question about technique. This is the other question, and it is more interesting: of all the things the Levant cooks over fire, why is it the chicken that travelled?

Lamb is the celebration meat. Kebabs are the export product. But the thing that put down roots in other countries, opened shops, acquired queues and got bought by private equity is charcoal chicken with garlic sauce. That is worth explaining, and it is worth being honest about which parts of the explanation we can actually show you.

Two dishes, one idea

“Lebanese charcoal chicken” covers two related formats, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is the whole bird: butterflied flat, cooked over coals, cut up, and served with a garlic sauce, bread and pickles. That is the one you get from a shop with a rotisserie window and a queue on the pavement, and it is the one our menu runs, printed as LEBANESE CHARCOAL CHICKEN (45MINS OF LOVING) — spatchcocked, green harissa, garlic-yuzu toum, sidewinder chips.

The second is the skewer: shish taouk, a marinated chicken shish kebab belonging to Turkish, Armenian and Arab cooking, which has spread across the Middle East and the Caucasus. It is cubes of chicken, marinated, skewered and grilled, with marinades commonly based on yoghurt and lemon juice, or on tomato purée. Our Haji Lane sibling runs that version, spelled Şiş Tawook on the Li’l Habibi card.

The name is two ordinary words in a language most people do not connect it to. Şiş is Turkish for skewer, and it evolved from the Old Turkic sış, meaning “pointed stick”. Tavuk comes from the Old Turkic takagu and means chicken. Skewer chicken. That is the whole name.

The sauce is not a condiment

Every version of this dish, in every country it has reached, arrives with garlic. In Syria and Lebanon the skewers are usually served with toum — a garlic paste sauce — along with hummus and tabbouleh. In sandwich form it comes in flatbread or as a dürüm, generally with lettuce, tomatoes and pickled turnips.

Toum is not a dip that happens to be nearby. It is emulsified garlic and oil, closer to a paste than a mayonnaise, and it is doing to grilled chicken exactly what the dish needs done: adding fat, adding a violent aromatic hit, and cutting the flatness that lean grilled poultry falls into. We have taken toum apart properly elsewhere, including why ours has yuzu in it and what that costs. What matters here is structural: take the garlic sauce away and the dish stops working, which is not true of most grilled meats.

Now the part everyone asserts and nobody sources

Search for this dish and you will be told it has a cult following. We were about to write that sentence ourselves, and then went looking for something to hang it on, because a claim like that either has evidence behind it or it is decoration.

Here is what we found, and it is not in Beirut. It is in Sydney.

El Jannah was founded by Andre and Carole Estephan, and its first store opened in the Sydney suburb of Granville in 1998. It sells Lebanese-style charcoal chicken with a garlic sauce, alongside fried chicken, skewers, burgers, wraps, salads and rolls. Its early coverage says the first shop amassed a cult-like following. As of March 2026 it runs 51 restaurants across New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory.

In November 2025 the American private equity firm General Atlantic acquired it. The reported sale price sits between A$800 million and almost a billion dollars. After the acquisition the chain announced plans to open more than 25 restaurants inside twelve months and to reach 200 locations across Australia within five years.

That is the honest shape of the answer. The cult following is real, it is documented, and what is documented is the diaspora’s, not the homeland’s — a family recipe carried out of Lebanon, opened as a shop in western Sydney, and valued twenty-seven years later at close to a billion dollars. Nobody writes that story about a lamb kebab.

Why this dish and not another — our reading, not a fact

We cannot source a definitive answer to why chicken was the one that travelled, so what follows is a working kitchen’s reasoning rather than a citation. Take it as an argument.

It is the cheapest thing fire genuinely improves. Charcoal flatters fat, and chicken skin is fat that comes attached to an inexpensive bird. A shop can sell a whole one at a family price and still hand over something that tastes like it took effort, which is a very hard trick to pull off with lamb.

It survives the journey. A butterflied chicken cut into pieces, a tub of garlic sauce and a bag of bread go into a box and come out of the box more or less intact. A rare steak does not.

It needs one sauce. Most grill traditions ask a kitchen to hold a repertoire. This one asks for garlic, done extremely well, forever. That is a business that can be run by a family and taught to the next one.

And the format is communal by default. Nobody orders a quarter of a charcoal chicken for themselves. It arrives cut up in the middle of the table with bread around it, which is the same instinct that produced the mezze board and, on the other side of our menu, the izakaya.

What we are and are not

We are not a charcoal chicken shop, and this post is not a claim to that lineage. We are a Japanese–Middle Eastern izakaya in Jalan Besar that happens to think this is the most instructive dish on its own menu, because it is the one where the method was necessary rather than merely flattering.

Ours also departs from the template in two visible ways, and we would rather say so than let the word “Lebanese” imply otherwise. The toum has yuzu in it. And the second sauce on the plate is a green harissa, which is North African rather than Lebanese — one of several words on our card that are not from the country the dish is named after, all of which are set out in the glossary.

What we will not tell you is what we burn under it. Our site calls us a charcoal grill and the menu says charcoal chicken; neither names a fuel, so neither does this post. If the fuel argument itself interests you, it matters rather less than the marketing suggests. We take the same position about the wasabi on our own menu, and for the same reason.

And if what you actually want is this cooking somewhere other than our dining room, we went and checked the Middle Eastern restaurants in Singapore that are not in Kampong Glam, one by one, against what each of them publishes itself.

If you want it

Order it early. It is billed at 45 minutes on the menu and that number is not a flourish — it should be the first thing you say to whoever takes your order, not an afterthought once the mezze has landed. Fill the gap with the board.

Sources

The shish taouk definition, etymology, marinades and the toum-hummus-tabbouleh service note are from Wikipedia’s article on shish taouk. The El Jannah founding, the “cult-like following” description, the 51-restaurant figure, the General Atlantic acquisition and the expansion plans are from Wikipedia’s article on El Jannah. Both read on 10 September 2026. Our own two menu lines were re-read from the live food and Li’l Habibi PDFs the same day. The section headed “our reading, not a fact” is exactly that, and is not sourced.

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday 11am to 2.30pm. Li’l Habibi is at 55 Haji Lane, Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm. We serve pork and alcohol and are not halal. The wider map is the full guide to Japanese food in Singapore; the fire itself is in the gallery; and if you want the bird, book a table and ask for it early.