What “Habibi-san” Actually Means

People ask about the name more than they ask about any single dish, usually somewhere between the first drink and the mezze arriving. It is a fair question. “Habibi-san” is two languages stapled together, and the staple is the point.

So: what it means, where each half comes from, why we put them in that order, and what it tells you about the food before you have eaten any of it.

Habibi — the Arabic half

Habibi (حبيبي) means “my beloved”. It is built from the Arabic root ḥ-b-b, which carries the idea of love, and it is a possessive form — ḥabīb is a beloved, and the “-i” on the end makes it mine. Said to a woman it becomes habibti.

What matters is how it is actually used, because “my beloved” makes it sound far more solemn than it is. Across the Arab world, habibi is everyday speech. It goes to a brother, a friend, a taxi driver, a small child, someone you are gently disagreeing with, someone whose name you have forgotten. It is closer to “mate”, “love” or “darling” in English than to a declaration. It can be warm, it can be exasperated, and it is very often both at once.

That register — affectionate, unceremonious, not precious — is exactly the register we wanted for a restaurant.

-san — the Japanese half

The suffix さん is the standard Japanese honorific, the one you attach to a name when you are being ordinarily polite. Tanaka-san. It is neutral and it does not change with gender, which makes the usual English glosses — Mr, Ms, Mrs — all slightly wrong and none of them badly so.

Here is the part that made the name work for us. In Japanese, -san does not only go on people. It goes on shops and trades. The bookshop is the hon’ya-san. The florist is the hanaya-san. The fishmonger is the sakanaya-san. Attaching -san to a business is an everyday courtesy, a way of speaking about the corner shop as though it were a neighbour rather than a premises.

So “Habibi-san” does not read, in Japanese, as a person’s name with a title on it. It reads more like the darling shop — the place on the corner you are fond of.

Strictly speaking we are breaking a small rule by using it about ourselves, since a Japanese speaker does not attach -san to their own name. We are aware. We think a restaurant that puts mentaiko in taramasalata has probably forfeited the right to be strict about anything.

Why the name is the menu in miniature

Take an Arabic term of endearment. Apply a Japanese honorific to it. Neither half is altered; each is doing what it normally does; the result is something that could not exist in either language on its own.

That is precisely the operation we run in the kitchen. Babaganoush is smoked eggplant, as it should be — then it meets kinnogomadare, a golden Japanese sesame sauce. Chickpea hummus stays hummus, then takes macadamia tahini and a spoon of ikura. Lamb tartare is kibbeh nayyeh, the Levantine raw-lamb preparation, dressed with wasabi ponzu. A Lebanese charcoal chicken gets a toum sharpened with yuzu.

Nothing is disguised as something else. The two traditions are just made to sit at the same table and be civil, which is also, more or less, what the name does. If you want the dish-level version of that argument, it is in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern fusion spot, and the menu is the shortest version of all.

How to say it

Roughly: hah-BEE-bee sahn. Stress the middle syllable of habibi; keep “san” short, closer to the vowel in “font” than in “sand”.

Nobody at the door will correct you. We have heard every variation and answer to all of them.

What the name commits us to

A name that translates to something like “darling” sets an expectation about how a room should feel, and we would rather be held to it than not.

It is why the format is small plates in the middle of the table instead of a march of courses — the argument for that is in what makes an izakaya authentic. It is why the drinks menu carries the line “Serious food, never a serious mood,” which is the closest thing we have to a statement of intent. And it is why our sister counter on Haji Lane describes itself, on its own menu, as “a Middle Eastern–Japanese izakaya that loves a good charcoal flirt”.

Serious about the fire, the sourcing and the seasoning. Not serious about very much else.

One point of confusion worth clearing up

“Habibi” is a common and much-loved word, so it is unsurprising that more than one business in Singapore uses it. There is an unrelated venue trading under a similar name. We are not it, and it is not us.

To be unambiguous:

Habibi-san is at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar — open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm.

Li’l Habibi, our kushiyaki counter, is at 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, inside Bar Stories — open Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm.

Those two are the whole family. If a listing sends you anywhere else under our name, it is out of date — which happens often enough that we wrote the whole story of the move in from Haji Lane to Hamilton Road. More about who we are is on the about page, and when you would like to come and use the name in person, you can book a table here.

The name is the short version of a much longer story. The five-year timeline covers what we have done with it since December 2020, the Middle Eastern thread covers where the first half of the cooking came from, and what a fire kitchen actually asks covers the half that happens over charcoal.

The other half of how we describe ourselves: fun dining, not fine dining — what we actually mean by it.