Middle Eastern Food in Singapore Beyond Arab Street

If you search for Middle Eastern food in Singapore, you get Kampong Glam. Bussorah Street, Arab Street, Baghdad Street, the row of shisha terraces near the mosque. That concentration is real and it is worth visiting, and it is also the entire answer most guides give.

This is a guide to the rest of it — Lebanese, Persian, Turkish and modern Middle Eastern rooms in other parts of the city, each one checked on 10 September 2026 against what the restaurant publishes on its own website, not against a listing.

How we checked, and what we are not claiming

Every address, every set of hours and every description of a restaurant’s own concept below was read off that restaurant’s own site today. Where a venue publishes something we cannot confirm — or does not publish it at all — we say so in the entry rather than borrowing a number from an aggregator.

We have not eaten recently at all of these, and where we have not, we do not review the food. What this list is good for is orientation: who is where, what kind of Middle Eastern cooking they do, and whether the door will be open when you get there.

Fat Prince — 48 Peck Seah Street, Tanjong Pagar

The CBD entry, and the one closest in spirit to what we do: a Middle Eastern kitchen that is not trying to be a traditional one. Its own site describes it as “a vibrant Middle Eastern restaurant in Singapore redefining what Mediterranean food can be”, built on “the beauty of contrast: smoky and bright, rich and refreshing, modern yet rooted in tradition”.

Address as published: 48 Peck Seah Street, Singapore 079317. Phone +65 3129 7547. Hours, first-party: Monday to Friday, lunch 12pm–2.30pm and dinner 5.30pm–midnight; Saturday and Sunday, brunch 12pm–3pm and dinner 5.30pm–midnight.

It displays a MICHELIN Selected badge on its own homepage. We flag that specifically because the Michelin site itself is unreadable to us — it blocks our requests outright — so a venue’s own page is the only way we can source that kind of recognition first-party, and Fat Prince publishes it.

UMMI Lebanese Dining — 1 Nanson Road, Robertson Quay

The formal one. It sits inside the InterContinental at Robertson Quay and calls itself “an authentic and modern Lebanese dining destination inspired by the heart and soul of Lebanon’s vibrant food culture”.

Address as published: InterContinental Robertson Quay, 1 Nanson Road, Singapore 238909. Phone +65 6970 1797. Hours are split and worth reading carefully before you turn up: lunch Tuesday to Saturday, 12pm–3pm with last orders at 2.30pm; dinner Monday to Saturday, 6pm–11pm with last food order at 9.45pm. Closed Sundays. That is a Monday dinner service with no Monday lunch, and a 9.45pm food cut-off inside an 11pm close — two details a listing will flatten into “6pm–11pm” and get you in trouble.

Third-party write-ups attach a well-known chef’s name to this kitchen. The restaurant’s own site does not state a chef, so we do not either.

Shabestan — 80 Mohamed Sultan Road, The Pier @ Robertson

The Persian one, and the only entry here representing that kitchen. It bills itself simply as “Finest Persian Cuisine”, which is a different tradition from the Levantine cooking most of this list does — rice, saffron, grilled meats and stews rather than a mezze board.

Address as published: 80 Mohamed Sultan Road #01-13, The Pier @ Robertson, Singapore 239013. Phone +65 6836 1270.

And here is a live divergence you should know about. Booking platforms and review sites list this restaurant as open until midnight. Its own contact page says “12pm – 10pm, Mon – Sun”. We have printed the first-party hours. If you were planning on a late Persian dinner off the back of a listing, ring first.

Pistachio — 8 Raffles Avenue, Esplanade Mall

Middle Eastern and Mediterranean, with an Arabian culinary heritage in its own words, and the only entry on this list at the Marina end of town.

Address as published: 8 Raffles Avenue, #01-13D Esplanade Mall, Singapore 039802. Phone +65 6262 6400. Hours, first-party: daily 12pm–10pm, last order 9.15pm. The site names Chef Khaled Elelmi.

One thing to be aware of: this is a recent address. The site itself carries an “Opening on 3 Aug 2026” line for it. A number of listings still give an Orchard Road address at Wheelock Place, and that address does not appear on the restaurant’s own site at all. Go to the Esplanade.

Sofra Turkish Cafe & Restaurant — Marina Square

Included with a caveat, because it is the longest-running Turkish room on this list and because the caveat is itself useful.

Its own site says it has been going since 1999, calls itself “Singapore’s first Turkish restaurant” and says it has served for over twenty-seven years. It states plainly that it is Halal Certified and that a prayer room is available — which, for a lot of readers, is the single most useful line on this page. Phone as published: +65 6291 1433.

What it does not publish is the part you need: the site gives “Marina Square” with no unit number and no postal code, and no opening hours at all. We are not going to fill those in from somewhere else. Call before you go.

And ours, since it belongs on the list

Yes, this is us, and we would rather say so than pretend to be neutral. Habibi-san, 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar — a Japanese–Middle Eastern izakaya and charcoal grill, Tuesday to Sunday 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday 11am to 2.30pm.

We are the odd one out here on purpose: the Middle Eastern half of the menu runs mezze, a charcoal chicken and a lamb rump, and the Japanese half puts kombu, miso and cured roe underneath them. If that sounds like a gimmick, the argument for why the two cuisines actually fit is the honest version, and the mezze ordering guide is the practical one. We serve pork and alcohol and are not halal; Sofra above is the halal-certified option on this page.

Our Haji Lane sibling, Li’l Habibi, is in Kampong Glam — so if this whole post is an argument for leaving that neighbourhood, we are cheerfully inconsistent about it.

The ones we wanted to include and could not

This is why the list above is six entries and not twelve.

Urban Bites, the long-running Lebanese room on Telok Ayer Street, would have been an obvious inclusion. Its own domain does not resolve at all — we tried it with and without the www. host — and at least one review platform now marks the restaurant as closed. We are not declaring it closed on that evidence. We are also not sending you there.

Al-Hamra at Holland Village has a live domain that resolves and returns a page. We opened it in a browser rather than trusting the raw fetch, and what it renders is two words: “Launching Soon”. That is a parked placeholder, not a website.

Kazbar, The Ottoman Room and Beirut Grill all appear on current best-of lists. We could not find a first-party site for any of them today, and a listing is not a source.

And a lesson we learned the hard way and would rather pass on: aggregator lists of Middle Eastern restaurants in Singapore still recommend Artichoke. Artichoke left Middle Road in 2024 and stopped being a Middle Eastern restaurant in 2025 — it is a pizza parlour now. We published that stale recommendation ourselves and had to correct it, which is exactly why every entry above was read off the venue’s own site today.

Where to go next

If Kampong Glam is what you wanted after all, the Haji Lane food guide is the street-level version and it is checked far more often than this page will be.

For the wider restaurant lists on this blog: Japanese restaurants worth the hype, fusion restaurants in Singapore, affordable Japanese dining, and date-night rooms that are not boring. If it is the food rather than the venues you are after, the glossary of Lebanese words and the difference between hummus and baba ghanoush are the two most useful things we have written on the subject, and tahini itself gets taken apart separately.

Come to ours if you want the version with a Japanese kitchen behind it: the room, and a table.