Sunday Brunch in Singapore with a Middle Eastern Twist

Sunday brunch is a different animal from Saturday brunch. Saturday you are still in weekend-launch mode — errands after, somewhere to be. Sunday you want a late start, a long table, and food that gives you a reason to sit for two hours without anybody checking a watch.

That is exactly the shape of a Middle Eastern table. Mezze is built for slow eating: a dozen small things arriving in waves, bread that keeps coming, dips you go back to three times. It is the one brunch format where lingering is the point rather than an accident.

So here is a Sunday-specific shortlist — every venue checked open on a Sunday, with the address and the hours we found. Every venue below was re-checked against its own website on 2 September 2026, and Anatolia, Moxie and Tolido’s were re-checked again on 8 September 2026 — Anatolia and Moxie confirmed word for word, Tolido’s downgraded further; where a venue no longer publishes a first-party source we say so in its entry rather than leaving a confident sentence standing on nothing. Where a place is only a Saturday option, we say so, because a closed door at 11.30am on a Sunday is the whole day ruined.

Re-verified 10 October 2026. Every venue was read on its own website again that morning. Anatolia (58 Arab Street, “Open 7 days a week, 10am – 12am”), Moxie (2 College Road, weekend brunch 11.30am to 5.30pm with last food order at 3.30pm, closed Mondays), Hjh Maimunah’s Jalan Pisang branch (“Closed on Sundays”) and our own hours all match what is printed below. Artichoke’s site still presents it as a “New School Pizza Parlor”. Tolido’s domain still shows only “Próximamente”, and Zam Zam still has no site of its own, so those two entries keep their flags.

Habibi-san — 29 Hamilton Road (yes, this is us)

Declaring the obvious first: we run this one. We serve brunch Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 2.30pm, at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar.

The reason we belong on a Middle Eastern Sunday list is that our whole kitchen is built on the mezze logic above, run through a Japanese filter and over a charcoal fire. Chickpea hummus comes with macadamia tahini and ikura. Babaganoush is smoked eggplant with kinnogomadare — a golden sesame sauce — plus tempura crisp and togarashi. Labne is strained in-house and topped with smoked shimeji. Pita chars directly over the coals rather than in a toaster, which is a small thing that changes the entire plate.

At brunch the dips arrive differently: the brunch card serves hummus, babaganoush, matbucha and labneh together as one mezze platter with sourdough, and the descriptions above come from the dinner menu. Our brunch menu, read line by line, is here.

Practical notes: we are closed Mondays, dinner runs Tuesday to Sunday 5pm to 11pm, and brunch books through the same Chope page as dinner. Updated 23 October 2026: this line used to say weekend brunch books out faster than dinner, which we had no record to support. Reserve a table here, or read the full menu first if you would rather know what you are walking into.

One to know about: Artichoke has left Middle Road

This entry used to be a recommendation. It is now a correction, because the facts changed and a lot of live guides have not caught up.

Artichoke — chef-owner Bjorn Shen’s restaurant, which served modern Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food in Singapore for well over a decade — left 161 Middle Road in May 2024 and moved to New Bahru, at 46 Kim Yam Road, #01-02, though we should be precise about that address: it is widely reported and Artichoke’s own site does not publish an address at all, so treat the street name as reported rather than first-party. Then in 2025, after fifteen years, it stopped being a Middle Eastern restaurant altogether. It now trades as Artichoke Pizza Parlor, and Shen’s own site describes it today as “a new school pizza parlor”. If you find an older listing promising Artichoke shakshuka on Middle Road, it is describing a restaurant that has not been there for two years.

Full disclosure, since it is relevant: both our founders, Jonathan Lee and Nadine Tay, worked at Artichoke before starting Habibi-san, and the Middle Eastern half of our own menu traces back to that kitchen — we have written about that thread separately. We are not neutral about the place. That is precisely why we would rather flag the change than leave a stale address sitting on this page.

Tolido’s Espresso Nook — 462 Crawford Lane, #01-63

Open Saturday and Sunday 9am to 6.30pm, which makes it the most forgiving option here if your Sunday starts slowly or you are eating on someone else’s schedule. It is a small Melbourne-style café tucked into a walk-up block in Lavender, and it has been running since 2013. Flagged 2 September 2026: we can no longer confirm those hours first-party. Its own domain, tolidos.com, now serves nothing but a logo on a black background, with no address, hours or menu anywhere on it, and its Chope listing returns a “nothing came up in your search” page. Nothing suggests it has closed and we are not claiming it has, but the hours above now rest on third-party listings rather than on the cafe’s own words, so call before making a trip for it. Re-tested 8 September 2026 by rendering the domain in a browser rather than fetching it, which is the check that has rescued other venues from exactly this symptom. It did not rescue this one: rendered in full, tolidos.com displays a single word, “Próximamente” — Spanish for “coming soon”. That is a placeholder page, not a site we were failing to read, and it makes the domain a dead end rather than a difficult one. We still are not claiming the cafe has closed, and everything above still stands on third-party listings. Call first.

The Middle Eastern thread here is in the brunch menu rather than the fit-out — shakshuka sits alongside the usual eggs-and-toast canon. It is genuinely small, so the trade for those long hours is a queue at peak. Go at 9.30am or after 2pm.

Anatolia — 58 Arab Street

Open daily, 10am to midnight, about seven minutes’ walk from Bugis MRT. This is the most literal answer to “Middle Eastern brunch” on the list: a Turkish breakfast spread plus separate cold and hot mezze sections, which is precisely the small-plates-in-waves structure that makes a Sunday table work.

Because it opens at 10am every day of the week including Sunday, it is also the reliable fallback when everywhere else is either fully booked or shut.

Moxie — 2 College Road, Medical Alumni Association, Level 1

Weekend brunch Saturday and Sunday, 11.30am to 5.30pm, with last food order at 3.30pm — note that gap, because the room stays open well past the point where the kitchen stops taking orders. Closed Mondays.

Modern Mediterranean rather than strictly Middle Eastern, which in practice means hummus and harissa show up next to pasta. The long service window is the real draw: it is one of the few places on this list where a 3pm sit-down still counts as brunch.

Singapore Zam Zam — 697–699 North Bridge Road

Open daily 7am to 11pm. Not brunch in the eggs-and-flat-white sense at all — this is a 1908 Indian-Muslim institution across from Sultan Mosque, and what you go for is murtabak and biryani. We include it because a Sunday late morning in Kampong Glam with a murtabak is a legitimate version of this meal, and because the hours have always been the most dependable thing about it. Flagged 29 August 2026: the web address this restaurant used to publish no longer belongs to it — it has since redirected to unrelated sites (an overseas gambling site in August; on 20 October 2026, a different unrelated domain that did not load) — so we no longer have a first-party source for those hours. Nothing suggests anything has changed at 697 North Bridge Road, and we are not claiming otherwise; we simply cannot check it the way we check the rest of this list, and would rather say so than let a confident sentence stand on nothing.

If you are making a morning of the neighbourhood, it pairs naturally with a wander down the road — our Haji Lane food guide covers what is worth stopping for on the same walk.

One to know about: Hjh Maimunah is closed on Sundays

Worth stating plainly, because it appears on a lot of weekend lists that do not mention it. Hjh Maimunah at 11 Jalan Pisang now trades 7.30am to 7pm Monday to Saturday and is closed on Sunday. It is a Saturday-brunch answer, not a Sunday one. Plan around it.

How to actually order a Middle Eastern Sunday brunch

The mistake is ordering like it is a Western brunch — one plate each, everyone facing their own food. The format works better the other way round.

• Start with three or four dips, not one. The contrast is the point: something smoky, something sharp, something creamy. One dip for the table is a sad table.
• Order bread twice. Once at the start, once when the dips are half gone. Bread that has been sitting for twenty minutes is not the same food.
• Add one hot thing per two people, not per person. Mezze plus one substantial dish feeds a pair comfortably.
• Do not front-load the whole order. Sunday brunch is a two-hour format. Order in two rounds and you eat at the right pace.

Where this fits

If you want the wider picture rather than the Sunday-specific one, our guide to brunch in Singapore maps the city by neighbourhood and occasion, and the ranked brunch shortlist covers the café-led end of the scene — deliberately no overlap with the venues above, so the two lists are worth reading together rather than instead of each other.

And if the Japanese-Middle Eastern angle is the part that interests you, that is the whole premise of our kitchen. The gallery shows what the room and the plates actually look like, and weekend brunch tables open on Chope.