Sharing-Plate Rules: How to Eat Mezze the Izakaya Way

We run a mezze section and an izakaya ordering format at the same time, in the same room, off the same fire. Both are sharing traditions. Both put small plates in the middle of a table. And they are not the same thing, which becomes obvious the first time somebody orders a whole meal at once and then watches half of it go cold while the grill is still working.

This post is about the difference, and about the handful of rules that follow from it. Not what mezze is — our own board is written up separately — but how to eat across a table when two traditions of sharing are running at once.

Start with the two words, because they disagree

Mezze comes into Arabic as مزة (mazza) from Ottoman Turkish meze, and before that from Persian مزه (maze) — meaning “taste, snack”. The word names the food. A small thing you taste.

Izakaya is 居酒屋: iru, to stay, plus sakaya, sake shop. The word names the room. A place you stay in and drink.

That is not a piece of trivia; it is the whole difference in miniature. Mezze is defined by what is on the table. An izakaya is defined by how long you are at it. Put the two together and you get a table where the food wants to be laid out all at once and the evening wants to be assembled in pieces over three hours.

How each tradition actually behaves

Mezze arrives together and stays. Across Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and the wider Eastern Mediterranean, mezze is not a course of starters preceding a main — it is the meal. The plates land in the middle, everyone reaches, bread gets torn and passed, and the spread sits there being returned to for as long as the table lasts. A dip does not get “finished” at a particular moment. It is infrastructure.

Izakaya plates arrive in waves and go. Food at an izakaya is ordered throughout the session as you feel like it, and it comes out when it is cooked rather than in a fixed sequence, usually beginning with the quick things and moving towards heavier ones. A skewer is a moment. It arrives hot, it gets eaten, the plate goes away, and something else comes.

One tradition builds a landscape. The other runs a conveyor. Our table does both, and the trick is knowing which of your dishes is which.

Our two menus disagree about this in print, and it is worth reading

We went and checked our own paperwork for this post rather than describing it from memory, and the result was more interesting than expected.

The Hamilton Road food menu never uses the word “share”. Not once. Nor “sharing”, “portion”, “starter”, “appetiser”, “course”, or “for the table”. Four section headings — mezze, small plates, biggies, sweet endings — and no instruction anywhere about how many people any of it is for.

The Li’l Habibi menu, from the same kitchen, talks about almost nothing else. It has a section headed to share — subtitled “or for one greedy person” — its mezze set is annotated “Feeds 2-3, but definitely not 4”, its skewer set says it feeds one greedy person, and its footer reads “Sharing is caring”.

Two menus, one kitchen, opposite amounts of instruction. The reason is the room. At Li’l Habibi you are at a bar in Haji Lane, possibly two of you, possibly on the way somewhere, and the menu has to tell you what a set actually covers. At Hamilton Road the sharing is assumed rather than offered, because the format does not have another mode. Nobody is going to hand you a plated main.

The rules, such as they are

1. Order in waves. Three or four things, then stop.

The single most common way to make one of these tables go wrong is to order the whole evening in one go. It arrives in a heap, the cold things and the hot things land together, and the pace of the meal is decided before it starts. Order three or four, eat them, then order again. The kitchen is expecting exactly that.

2. Get the bread down first, and keep it coming.

Dips need something to happen on. Our pita is listed per piece precisely so you can keep asking, and it comes off the grates rather than out of a warmer. If you are ordering dips without bread already on the way, you have built a table that cannot start.

3. Sort your order into things that wait and things that do not.

This is the rule that comes straight from the two traditions colliding. Matbucha, hummus, babaganoush, labne, the olives — these are mezze in behaviour as well as name. They sit. They are fine ten minutes later, arguably better.

Anything that has been over the fire is the opposite. It has a window. Put the dips in the first wave and the grill items in the second, and the table never has anything sitting there getting sad.

4. Do not do one-dish-per-person maths.

Counting heads and multiplying is restaurant logic and it does not transfer. What works is ordering fewer things than you think for the first round and then adding, because you can always add — and because our kitchen fires as it goes, the next wave is not a twenty-minute penalty.

If you want the numbers version of this, what dinner here costs works through ordering by budget rather than by head count.

5. Someone has to be the orderer.

Not a captain — a coordinator. Sharing formats fail by consensus: four people politely deferring produces either nothing or everything. One person owning the rhythm, checking in between waves, is the difference between a table that flows and a table that arrives in one lump. If nobody wants that job, our chef’s-choice option takes it off you entirely — that is what FEEEEED ME! is for.

6. Leave the big plate until the table has settled.

Our biggies come off the charcoal grill and they take as long as they take — the Lebanese charcoal chicken carries the subline (45MINS OF LOVING) on the printed menu, which is a joke and also a schedule. Order it early in the evening and late in the sequence. It should land when the first two waves have been cleared and everybody is comfortable, not while people are still deciding.

7. You are allowed to change your mind.

This is the actual gift of the format and it is easy to miss. Nothing is committed at the moment you order. You can decide at the second wave that the table wants more mezze and no meat at all, or the reverse. A set menu cannot do that — which is also why this works so well when nobody could agree on the restaurant in the first place.

And the drinking half of it

One drink is not going to cover three hours of this, so we have written the pairing side up properly: wine with mezze, dish by dish and sake pairings for the dips and the grilled lamb. And kanpai culture explains why the first round arrives before anything else does.

Booking, hours and the one dietary line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Closed Mondays. Book on Chope or through our reservations page.

Habibi-san is not halal. We serve pork and we have a full bar — the FAQ covers the practical questions. For the wider format, our izakaya guide is the hub, the piece on what separates an izakaya from a restaurant and a bar explains why the ordering works like this at all, and the gallery shows what a table looks like halfway through.

Sources

The etymology of mezze: Wiktionary, مزة. The etymology of izakaya, and the description of how izakaya food is ordered and served: Wikipedia, “Izakaya”. Both read 5 September 2026. Every menu observation above comes from our own printed menus; the Hamilton Road food menu was re-extracted in full the same day, and the Li’l Habibi wording is quoted from that venue’s own card.