A Beginner’s Glossary of Lebanese Food

A Middle Eastern menu is mostly transliterated Arabic, and transliteration is generous — the same dish can be spelled four ways on four cards down the same street. This is the short list of words worth knowing before you order, with what each one actually means.

It comes with a complication we would rather state at the top than bury. A good number of the Middle Eastern words on our own menu are not Lebanese at all. They are Tunisian, Maghrebi, Syrian or Greek, and a menu that files them all under “Lebanese” is doing the region a small disservice. So this glossary is in three parts: the Lebanese words, the borrowed ones, and the one we cannot source.

The Lebanese and Levantine words

  • Mezze (also meze) — an array of small dishes placed before the guests. It is a structure, not a dish. How many plates a board actually needs is its own question.
  • Hummus — literally chickpeas. The full name, hummus bi tahina, means chickpeas with tahini.
  • Tahini — sesame paste. It is in hummus’s name and it is the thing that defines mutabbal.
  • Baba ghanoush — roasted eggplant, olive oil, lemon, seasonings and, optionally, tahini. Mutabbal is the closely related dish that is defined by mashed grilled vegetables plus tahini, and it is not restricted to eggplant. The two get swapped constantly; we untangle them in hummus versus baba ganoush.
  • Labneh — yoghurt strained to remove the watery whey, leaving something thicker and creamier. Ours is housemade and printed “labne”, one of those four-spellings cases.
  • Toum — garlic sauce. Emulsified, ferocious, and a whole subject on its own.
  • Kibbeh — a filled bulgur dough made with ground meat. Kibbeh nayyeh is the raw version, minced raw lamb — ours is on the small plates.
  • Za’atar — dried thyme and sumac, in a blend that differs between regions. The word names both the herb and the mixture, which is why two jars labelled za’atar can taste unalike.
  • Sumac — a tangy spice used in many salads. It does the job lemon does, without the liquid.
  • Khubz — bread. Khubz Arabi, Arab bread, is the pocketed round most people call pita.
  • Tabbouleh — a diced parsley salad with bulgur wheat, tomato and mint. Note the proportions implied by that order: it is a parsley salad, not a grain salad.
  • Fattoush — the “peasants’ salad”, built on pita with cucumbers, tomatoes and mint. The bread is the point.
  • Shawarma — slow-cooked skewered meat, chicken, lamb or beef, thinly sliced.
  • Muhammara — a hot pepper dip, and here is the first honest asterisk: it is originally from Aleppo, Syria, even though it lives on Lebanese menus everywhere.
  • Muhallebi — a milk pudding made with rice, milk and sugar. Ours is not the rice version: it is a vanilla and yoghurt milk pudding. Same family, different build, and worth saying rather than letting the name imply otherwise.

The words on our own card that are not Lebanese

These four turn up on our menu and none of them comes from Lebanon.

  • Harissa is Tunisian — a hot chilli paste of roasted red peppers, Baklouti peppers, garlic, caraway, coriander, cumin and olive oil. It is not a Levantine condiment, and its chillies only reached the region through the Columbian exchange, presumably during the Spanish occupation of Hafsid Tunisia between 1535 and 1574. Our green harissa goes with the charcoal chicken and our red with the skewers.
  • Matbucha is North African, created by the Amazigh, and became widespread in Israel after Moroccan Jewish communities brought it there. The name is Arabic for “cooked” — French menus render it salade cuite — and it is slow-cooked tomatoes and roasted peppers with garlic and chilli. Ours goes through kombu dashi, which is a second departure on top of the first.
  • Méchoui is Maghrebi, from the Arabic šawā, grilling or roasting. Properly it is a whole sheep or lamb spit-roasted beside embers, or buried in an earthen oven for four or five hours. On our card it is a spice rub on a lamb rump — a word for a method borrowed as a word for a seasoning, which is common on menus and worth knowing when you meet the real thing.
  • Spanakopita and kataifi are Greek, and we do not pretend otherwise — the spanakopita gets Japanese curried cream and the kataifi gets Valrhona.

None of this is a confession. Borrowing across the region is what the region has always done. It is only worth flagging because “Lebanese” on a Singapore menu often means “somewhere between Tunis and Aleppo”, and you may as well know which.

The one we cannot source

Taklia. It is printed on our labne line, and it is a fried garlic-and-coriander preparation used across the Levant. We are flagging it because we could not confirm it in the same reference we used for every other word here, and the rule we work to is that a term we cannot check gets said out loud rather than quietly asserted. If you know the authority on it, we would genuinely like the citation.

And the other half of our menu

Every dish on our card has a Japanese component as well, so the Arabic is only half the reading. Kinnogomadare, ikura, tobiko, mentaiko, ponzu, kombu, togarashi and the rest are set out in our guide to the dishes themselves, and there is a short izakaya vocabulary at the end of the izakaya guide. Why the two halves fit at all is a separate argument.

Practical notes

The mezze, the kibbeh nayyeh and the charcoal chicken are at 29 Hamilton Road, Jalan Besar, Tuesday to Sunday 5pm–11pm, with brunch Saturday and Sunday 11am–2.30pm. Li’l Habibi at 55 Haji Lane runs a shorter board and a skewer list. We serve pork and alcohol at both and are not halal; the practical questions are in the FAQ.

For the wider map, the full guide to Japanese food in Singapore. Otherwise: the menus, the room, and a table.

Sources

Definitions of the Lebanese terms are from Wikipedia’s Lebanese cuisine article; the borrowed ones from harissa, matbucha and méchoui; the hummus and baba ghanoush entries from hummus and baba ghanoush. All read on 8 September 2026. Our own menu lines were re-read from the live PDF the same day. Taklia is the one term above that none of these sources carries.