What Reviewers Keep Ordering at Habibi-san

We read our own reviews. Not for the star ratings, which tell you almost nothing, but for the dish names — because when several hundred strangers write about the same kitchen over five years, the dishes they keep naming are a more honest menu than the one we print.

So here is that list, read back properly. Ratings and review counts were first checked on 19 August 2026 and re-read on 23 October 2026. Chope has us at 4.9 out of 5 from 51 reviews for the Hamilton Road room (it was 45 in August). Grab Dine Out had us at 5.0 from 20 in August; we could not re-read that listing in October, so treat it as an August figure. Burpple still carries 57 reviews. The interesting part is not the numbers. It is that a good share of what people rave about is food we have changed, moved, or stopped serving — and nobody has told them.

The sprouts, by a distance

Habibi’s Brussel sprouts — the menu spells it with one L, and we are not going to correct our own menu — is the single most-named dish in almost everything written about us. Charred sprouts in kinnogomadare, the golden Japanese sesame sauce, with red cabbage pickles, jalapenos and shredded bonito that lifts in the heat coming off the plate.

We did not design it as a signature. It became one in 2022, entirely because reviewers decided it had, and it has stayed the most-mentioned thing on the menu across both addresses — the one constant in five years of us moving everything else around. Our working theory is that it is a vegetable dish in a restaurant built around a charcoal grill and a butcher’s list, so it arrives with expectations set low, and then does not meet them so much as ignore them. We have since taken the plate apart component by component in a piece on the sprouts themselves.

The dips, and specifically which dips

Reviewers order mezze in groups and then name two of them: the chickpea hummus with macadamia tahini and ikura, and the babaganoush with kinnogomadare, roasted sesame, tempura crisp and togarashi. Those two do most of the talking in write-ups. The labne and the matbucha come up far less often, which we think is an ordering habit rather than a verdict — people order what they recognise, and a stewed tomato-and-pepper dish with kombu dashi is a harder sell on a menu than hummus. Both of the named ones now have their own write-ups: the hummus and its macadamia tahini, and the sesame sauce the babaganoush is built on.

On our Chope listing, where diners vote for dishes, two more sit at the top with five votes each on 23 October 2026, one behind the pork collar below: the cassava and taramasalata, and the Atlantic seabass. Both are dishes that reward being ordered on purpose rather than by default.

The pork collar, with a footnote

“The pork collar” turns up constantly in reviews, and it is the most-voted dish on our Chope listing (six votes on 23 October 2026), and it is the clearest example of why old reviews need reading carefully. Older listings still show an Iberico pork collar chop from the Haji Lane years. The Hamilton Road menu now runs a Mangalica pork collar chop with fennel spice, a wasabi and butter bean mash, charred vinegared radicchio and tonkotsu jus.

Same idea, different pig, different plate. If a review sent you here for the pork collar, you will get the current one, and it is the richest thing on the menu either way. The full write-up of the current chop is here — what a Mangalica is, why we grill the collar rather than the loin, and what the tonkotsu jus is for.

FEEEEED ME, for tables that have stopped choosing

Our omakase — minimum two guests, a run of dishes chosen by the kitchen, with anything you spotted on the menu still available as an add-on. It comes up in reviews less as a dish and more as a format: the thing people picked when they were four courses into a discussion about what to order. If you want the argument for it, and for how to build a table without it, we wrote the whole ordering method out in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern table.

Where the reviews have gone stale

This is the part restaurants tend not to publish, so: several dishes praised in reviews are not on the Hamilton Road menu at all.

A broccoli salad comes up in older write-ups. It is off. Charcoal-grilled prawns and a pistachio cheesecake also get named — both of those are on the menu at Li’l Habibi, our kushiyaki counter at 55 Haji Lane, not at Hamilton Road. The burrata is still with us, but the plate around it has changed; it now comes with ashtray tomatoes, daikon salsa and basil oil.

Prices in older reviews are worse than useless. They come off a menu we no longer run, in a room we no longer occupy. And Burpple, as of 23 October 2026, still lists Habibi-san at 55 Haji Lane with the old opening hours — an address that is now Li’l Habibi’s. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday, and if you want the reason for the move it is its own story. The current details are always on our location page rather than on somebody else’s listing.

The things we are not going to oversell

Reading your own reviews properly means reading the ones that are not flattering.

The Fremantle octopus divides people. Several reviewers have found it chewy. It is twice-cooked WA octopus with macadamia tahini and lime, we stand by it, and it is still not the dish we would point a first-timer at.

Portions are a standing complaint. We are not going to tell you our portions are generous, because a recurring line in reviews says otherwise and you would notice at the table. What we will say is that the format is small plates, and the ratio you order at matters more here than it does at a restaurant serving mains — under-ordering mezze is the single most common way to have a thin evening with us.

Desserts were the recurring criticism of the Haji Lane years, and fairly. The current three — muhallebi with morello cherries and soy caramel, the Valrhona chocolate kataifi tart, and the matcha-misu built on Sakari matcha sake — are a rebuild rather than an inheritance. Judge them as new, because they are.

And a fair technical note that comes up often enough to act on: the crisp elements soften. Tempura crumb, garlic crisps, the cassava chippies. Eat those first, and order pita again halfway through rather than all at the start.

If you are ordering straight off this post

The sprouts, two or three dips with pita, and one charcoal biggie between two — that is the order the reviews would have written for you, and it holds up. Or hand it over and take the omakase.

You can see most of what is described here on our menu and in the gallery. If it has convinced you, book a table — and if you would like to know what we think we are doing with all this, that is in fun dining, not fine dining and in how we actually run the kitchen. Reviews of the weekend brunch are rarer, because it runs on a separate card; that menu is read line by line here.

Re-checked 23 October 2026: Chope and Burpple re-read; Grab could not be re-read.