What Dinner at Habibi-san Costs: Ordering Strategies by Budget

Two things are true about what we cost, and they pull in opposite directions.

The food menu we publish for 29 Hamilton Road carries no prices at all. Not one. Li’l Habibi’s menu, at 55 Haji Lane, prints every single one. So this post can do real arithmetic for one of our rooms and only honest structure for the other, and pretending otherwise would mean inventing figures — which is the one thing we will not do on this blog.

Here is what we can prove, and what to do with it.

The two multipliers, which are not the same

Start at the bottom of the menu rather than the top, because our two rooms treat tax differently.

At Hamilton Road the menu reads “Prices subjected to 10% service charge. No G.S.T. Woohoo!” So whatever you are quoted, multiply by 1.1. A hundred dollars of food is a hundred and ten dollars at the till.

At Li’l Habibi it is 10% service charge and 9% GST, applied one after the other. That multiplier is 1.199 — call it a fifth. A hundred dollars of food is $119.90. Every Li’l Habibi total below is shown after both charges, so what you read is what you would pay. If you want the general version of this argument for Singapore dining, we set it out in our guide to what Japanese food really costs here.

Li’l Habibi, priced and worked out

This is the honest half of the post, because these numbers are printed and we re-checked them against the live menu on 19 August 2026. On 21 October 2026 we confirmed that the menu file we publish had not changed since, so every price below still stands.

Mezze: pita $3 a piece, babaganoush $12, chickpea hummus $13, mentaiko taramasalata $13, roasted pepper $14. The set called GIMME ALL!!! is $35 and includes pita.

Smallish: roasted Brussel sprouts $22, seaweed fries $14, loaded pork nachos $23, charcoal prawns $36.

To share: şiş tawook $29, chargrilled mackerel kebabs $33, Margra lamb ribs $38, steak frites $52 for a 300g cut of the day.

Kushiyaki, per skewer: chicken hearts $9, Iberico pork jowl $12, mortadella $12, jujeh chicken wings $12, beef chuck $14. The skewer set, also called GIMME ALL !!!, is $50 and the menu says it feeds one greedy person.

Sweet: seasonal fruit tart $14, pistachio Basque cheesecake $16.

Do the sets actually save you anything?

Yes, measurably — but read the portion note, because the menu is unusually straight about it.

The four dips ordered one by one come to $52 before you have bought any bread. The GIMME ALL!!! mezze set is $35 with pita included. The menu then tells you plainly that it “feeds 2-3, but definitely not 4”, which is the sentence that stops this being a pure saving and starts it being a decision: it is cheaper per dip, and it is not four people’s dinner.

The skewers behave the same way. All five ordered individually are $59. The skewer set is $50 and is described as feeding one greedy person. So the set is the better buy if you were going to order across the range anyway, and the worse buy if there were only two skewers you actually wanted.

Three worked nights at Li’l Habibi

Two people, a light one. Mezze set $35 plus the skewer set $50 is $85 of food, which lands at $101.92 after service and GST. Around $51 a head, before drinks.

Two people, properly fed. Mezze set $35, Brussel sprouts $22, Margra lamb ribs $38 — $95 of food, $113.91 at the till. About $57 a head.

Four people. Take the menu at its word and buy two mezze sets at $70, add the skewer set at $50 and steak frites at $52. That is $172, or $206.23 paid. Roughly $52 a head, with the most expensive plate on the table shared four ways rather than two.

The pattern worth noticing: the per-head number barely moves between two people and four. Small-plate menus scale kindly. What changes the number is drinks, and every drink at Li’l Habibi comes from Bar Stories next door — worth knowing before you budget, and worth reading how ordering there works.

Where the omakase stops being the cheap option

Li’l Habibi’s FEED ME is $72 a head with a two-person minimum. For two that is $144 of food, $172.66 paid, about $86 each.

Now compare. The mezze set, the sprouts, the steak frites, the seaweed fries and a pistachio cheesecake comes to $139 between two — still short of $144, and already a heavier table than most people order. Both worked nights above come in far under it.

So the omakase is not the value play. It is the order-everything play: you are buying range and the kitchen’s sequencing rather than a discount, and it is priced accordingly. That is a perfectly good reason to book it. It is just not the reason people usually assume.

Hamilton Road, where we cannot give you numbers

The published menu carries no prices, so anything we printed here would be a guess, and a guess about your bill is worse than silence.

What we can tell you is the shape of it. The menu runs mezze, then small plates, then Biggies, and the cost ladder runs in that order too. Within the Biggies, the two beef dishes — the Angus ribeye MB4+ at 300g and the Blackmore full blood wagyu karubi MB9+ at 200g — sit at the top, because marbling grade is the single biggest lever on what a piece of beef costs anyone. The Lebanese charcoal chicken, which the menu bills as “45 mins of loving”, is the dish we would send a first table to, and it is not at that end of the ladder.

The multiplier is the kind one: 10% service, no GST. And FEEEEED ME, our omakase, needs a minimum of two guests.

To find out an actual figure, ask when you book, or ask the floor when you sit down. Nobody there minds the question, and it is a far better source than this page could be.

How to spend less without eating worse

Four things genuinely move the bill, at either room.

Scale the mezze, not the mains. The single most common expensive mistake is a table ordering one dip and three large plates. Reverse it. The full argument, layer by layer, is in how to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern table.

One biggie between two. Charcoal cooking rewards this — a single large plate that has had the fire’s full attention beats two that split it.

Order pita in rounds. It is charged per piece, so buying six at the start is not thrift, it is cold bread.

Pick the room to match the night. Li’l Habibi is the smaller door in, and it is the same kitchen thinking at a lighter number.

One warning about prices you find elsewhere

Listing sites still carry per-head averages for Habibi-san attached to our old Haji Lane address and to a menu we stopped running. Old reviews quote dish prices from the same era. None of that is current, and budgeting from it will put you out in both directions depending on which room you end up in. We went through which of those write-ups have aged badly in what reviewers keep ordering.

The menu here is the current one, the gallery shows what the plates actually look like, and the practical questions — booking, hours, dietary notes — are answered in our FAQ. When the maths works for you, book a table.

One last piece of context on the numbers: the two rooms are priced differently because they were built five years apart for different kinds of evening, which the timeline sets out properly.