Mezze in Singapore: How Our Modern Board Works

A mezze board fails in a predictable way. Everything on it is good, everything on it is soft, and by the fourth spoonful nobody can tell one dip from another. The problem is never the individual recipes. It is the ratio.

Our mezze section at 29 Hamilton Road runs to ten items. This is a guide to ordering across it rather than down it — what the section is actually built out of, what the Japanese half of the pantry is doing in there, and how many things you need before a table of two, four or six has a board instead of a queue of purées. Each dish has its own write-up elsewhere on this blog; this post is about the shape of the whole thing.

What is actually on the board

Ten items, in the order the menu prints them:

Pita — per piece, off the charcoal.
Fire-Tossed Edamame — shiro miso, confit garlic butter.
Matbucha — stewed roma tomatoes & peppers, browned butter, kombu dashi, nori.
Babaganoush — smoked eggplant, kinnogomadare, roasted sesame seeds, tempura, togarashi.
Some Special Kind of Olives — wood smoked olives, herb, lemon evoo. That is the item’s real name on the menu.
Labne — housemade strained yoghurt, smoked shimeji, taklia, garlic crisps, peppermint.
Chickpea Hummus — macadamia tahini, ikura.
Cassava & Taramasalata — twice-cooked cassava chippies, housemade labne, mentaiko XO, tobiko.
Habibi’s Spanakopita — japanese curried cream spinach, fuille de brik.
Fremantle Octopus — twice-cooked WA octopus, macadamia tahini, lime.

Read that list again and the first useful thing jumps out. Only four of the ten are dips in the sense most people mean — something you scoop. The other six are a bean dish, a bowl of olives, a chip-and-dip, a pastry, a whole cephalopod and a bread. The section is already built against the all-purée failure. Most tables order it back into one anyway, because hummus, babaganoush, labne and matbucha are the four names everybody recognises.

The two axes: texture, then heat

The way to order this section is to treat it as a grid rather than a list, and to fill both axes before you order a second thing from either.

Axis one: what your hand does

Three groups. Spreadable — hummus, babaganoush, labne, matbucha. Crunchy — the cassava chippies, the spanakopita’s pastry, the garlic crisps on the labne, the tempura on the babaganoush. Whole things you pick up — olives, edamame, octopus, pita.

A board with nothing from the third group has no pauses in it. That matters more than it sounds: the reason a mezze spread can hold a table for an hour is that some of it takes work to eat. Olives have pits. Edamame has pods. Those are not filler courses, they are the rests between the loud bars.

Axis two: what temperature it arrives at

The dips come cold or near room. The edamame, the pita, the spanakopita and the octopus come hot. Nothing on a spread wakes a palate up like a hot thing arriving among cold ones, and if you order only from the chilled half you have effectively ordered a starter course that all tastes like the inside of a fridge.

This is also the honest reason the pita line matters more than a bread line usually does. Ours goes over the charcoal, which means it turns up blistered and hot, and it is the only item on the section that improves everything else it touches. Order it first and order enough of it. It is also what you want on the table later, when the charcoal chicken arrives with a garlic-yuzu toum that needs something to go on.

What the Japanese half is actually doing

Look at the modifications across the section and they are almost embarrassingly consistent. Kombu dashi in the matbucha. Nori in the matbucha. Kinnogomadare and togarashi in the babaganoush. Shiro miso in the edamame. Smoked shimeji in the labne. Mentaiko XO and tobiko in the taramasalata. Ikura in the hummus. Those last three are the ones people treat as interchangeable orange things, and they are not; we told them apart properly in our guide to ikura, tobiko and mentaiko.

Every one of those is a savoury ingredient. Not a sweet one, not a floral one, not a novelty one. In their Levantine form these dips are built on acid, garlic, sesame and salt, and what they characteristically lack is the deep, slow, glutamate-driven register that Japanese cooking supplies as a matter of routine — kombu, miso, bonito, cured roe, dried mushroom.

So the fusion here is not a costume. It is a specific gap being filled with the ingredient class that fills it. That is why the results do not taste like a gimmick: nothing has been swapped out of the original dishes, something has been added underneath them. If you want the long version of that argument on a single dish, the matbucha is the clearest case on the menu — a Moroccan tomato and pepper stew with a Japanese seaweed stock in it, and the stock is doing the job the long cooking usually has to do alone.

It also explains one thing guests ask about. The board reads as Middle Eastern and eats as something slightly heavier and rounder than a Middle Eastern board usually does. That is the umami, and it is deliberate. The wider dish vocabulary behind those ingredients is worth knowing if you want to order well anywhere, not just here.

How many things to order

The honest answer depends on whether the mezze is the meal or the opening, and the two cases are genuinely different.

If mezze is the opening

For two people going on to a Biggie each: pita, one spreadable, one whole-thing. Three items. Any more and you will not want the lamb.

For four: pita, two spreadables that are not both beige, one crunchy, one whole-thing. The two-spreadable rule is the one people break. Hummus and babaganoush is the classic order and it is two soft, pale, sesame-forward plates; hummus and matbucha, or babaganoush and labne, gives you the same two scoops with actual contrast between them.

For six or more, you are past the point where ordering by item makes sense and into the territory where the chef’s-choice format does the work for you. The menu prints it as FEEEEED ME!, minimum two guests, described in the kitchen’s own words as “a series of dishes selected by the chefs, feel free to add on”.

If mezze is the meal

It can be. A table of two can eat well off four or five mezze plates and a bread, and plenty do. In that case swap the ratio: two spreadables, two whole-things, and the spanakopita or the cassava for the crunch, because when there is no main course arriving the board has to supply its own structure.

What we cannot do here is quote you a number, because the Hamilton Road food menu prints no prices at all — not for the mezze, not for anything. If you want a realistic picture of what an evening runs to before you book, we wrote that out separately in what dinner actually costs. The one figure the menu does print is its tax line: prices are subject to a 10% service charge, and, in the menu’s own words, “No G.S.T. Woohoo!”

The other board, at Haji Lane

There are two mezze sections in this business and they are not the same one. Li’l Habibi, our smaller sibling at 55 Haji Lane, prints a shorter list — and unlike Hamilton Road, it prints prices.

Its mezze runs to pita at 3 a piece, babaganoush at 12, chickpea hummus at 13, mentaiko taramasalata at 13, roasted pepper at 14, and a set called GIMME ALL!!! at 35 that includes the pita and is described on the menu as feeding “2-3, but definitely not 4”. Those are the numbers as printed; the menu writes them bare, without a dollar sign, and its tax line differs from ours — 10% service charge and 9% GST, where Hamilton Road charges service and no GST.

Two differences worth knowing before you pick a venue. Li’l Habibi’s babaganoush comes with keropok chicken skin where ours comes with tempura and togarashi, and its taramasalata is served as a dip in its own right rather than with the cassava chippies. And the set exists there and does not exist here, which is the single best reason to start at Haji Lane if you want the spread with the decision taken out of it. Li’l Habibi opens at 5.30pm, Tuesday to Sunday, and closes at 10.30pm.

What to drink with it

The board is salty, sour, smoky and garlicky in roughly that order, which is a hard brief for a big red and an easy one for almost everything else. Our list leans two ways that both work: the sake, which has the weight to sit under the sesame without adding tannin, and the Macedonian whites, which are on the list precisely because they are aromatic and dry. Both are on the wine and sake list, and the cocktail menu has a mojito twist called Levant built on cucumber, mint, whey, lime, rum and soda that was more or less designed for this section of the food menu.

One honest note before you book

Middle Eastern theming raises the question, so we answer it plainly: Habibi-san is not halal. We serve pork and we run a full bar, at both venues. That is covered along with everything else people ask in our FAQ. The menu also asks, in its own words, that you let us know if you have any dietary restrictions or food allergies — do, when you book rather than when you sit down, and the kitchen can plan the board around it.

If you want to see what the section looks like plated, the gallery is the honest version. If you already know what you want, the full menu is here and you can book a table. We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm.

And if you are new to the whole format and want the wider map first — what fusion dining in Singapore looks like beyond this one room — start with our full guide to Japanese food in Singapore, or with what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern place if you are deciding tonight.