Why We Close Mondays (and When to Book)

We get asked this more than you would think, usually by someone standing outside on a Monday evening reading our door. So here is the answer, without dressing it up.

We close on Mondays because a six-day week is what a charcoal kitchen can actually sustain, and because the six days we do open are busier than the raw number of days suggests. That is the whole reason. There is no romantic story underneath it.

Six days, eight services

Look at our published hours and count properly. Dinner at 29 Hamilton Road runs 5pm to 11pm, Tuesday through Sunday. That is six dinner services. Then brunch runs 11am to 2.30pm on Saturday and Sunday, which is two more.

Eight services. Six days.

Across at Li’l Habibi on Haji Lane, the pattern is the same shape: Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm. Another six. Between the two rooms the group opens its doors fourteen times a week, and every one of those openings lands inside a six-day window.

Put like that, “closed Mondays” stops looking like a shortened week and starts looking like the thing that makes the other six possible.

The weekend is two days doing four days’ work

Saturday and Sunday are the ones that do the damage, and they are the ones people forget when they picture a restaurant week.

On a Saturday we open for brunch at 11am and stop taking brunch at 2.30pm. Dinner opens at 5pm. That is a two-and-a-half hour gap in which a section that has been running hot all morning has to be brought down, cleaned, restocked and brought back up again before the first dinner booking walks in. Then we do it again on Sunday.

So the working week is not six equal days. It is four single-service days and two doubles. Anyone who has worked a weekend double knows what the following Monday is for.

A fire section does not switch off

The other half of the answer is the grill itself.

An induction hob is off when you turn it off. Charcoal is not a switch. It is a fuel that has to be lit, brought up, held at temperature across a service, and then burnt down and cleared — and the equipment it burns in collects everything that fire produces. Grates, bars, the fire bed underneath, the extraction above it. None of that is a wipe-down.

We are not going to give you a blow-by-blow tour of a day we do not spend in the building, because that would be inventing detail to sound diligent. What we will say plainly is that live fire is the most maintenance-hungry way to cook that we could have chosen, we chose it anyway, and a day with no service in it is when a fire kitchen catches up with itself.

If you want the version of this argument with actual technique in it, the way we run the kitchen day to day is a better read than anything we could invent about a Monday.

We are not the only ones on this street

Here is the part that surprised us when we went and checked. Monday is not our quirk. It is close to a neighbourhood habit, and you can read it straight off our neighbours’ own websites. We checked each of these on 20 August 2026, on the venue’s own site rather than a listings page:

• Red Eye Smokehouse, 1 Cavan Road, Singapore 209842 — another live-fire kitchen, and its own site lists Monday as closed. Tuesday to Saturday it runs 12pm–3pm and 5pm–10.30pm, Sunday 12pm–3pm and 5pm–9.30pm.
• Chye Seng Huat Hardware, 150 Tyrwhitt Road, Singapore 207563 — not shut every Monday, but its own site says “Closed every first Monday of the month”. A roastery takes its reset day too, just monthly.
• Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle, Blk 466 #01-12 Crawford Lane, Singapore 190466 — the famous one. Its own site: “Monday to Sunday: 9:00 am – 8:30 pm (close 1st and 3rd Monday every month)”. Twice a month, Monday off.
• Druggists, 119 Tyrwhitt Road, Singapore 207547 — the exception. Their homepage now says “Open Daily” and their own about page lists Monday 5PM–12MN. (Update, 4 October 2026: when we wrote this, the homepage said “daily except Mondays” and contradicted the about page; the two now agree, so Druggists is a Monday option.)

Four venues within a few minutes’ walk of each other, three of them building a Monday closure of some kind into the week. (The fourth, Druggists, now says it opens daily.) Fire, coffee and noodles all landing on the same day off is not a coincidence — it is what happens when the trade is physical and the weekend is the earner.

Update, 21 August 2026. We carried on checking, and the pattern held. La Levain, the bakery at 23 Hamilton Road, lists Monday closed on its own site (and Wednesday closing at 4.30pm). Frontyard, at 11 Sam Leong Road, trades Tuesday to Sunday. Further north, Marymount Bakehouse on Race Course Road publishes Wednesday to Sunday only — Monday and Tuesday off — and Founder Bak Kut Teh’s Balestier flagship closes Tuesdays. Bakers, it turns out, take the same day we do. The full lists are in our café trail and the Farrer Park guide.

So when should you actually book?

Practical bit, since that is presumably why you are here.

Tuesday and Wednesday are the calmest nights we have. If you want the room at conversation volume, or you want to sit at the counter and actually talk to whoever is on the grill, this is when. It is also the easiest window to walk in without a booking, though we would still rather you called.

Thursday through Saturday is when the room fills. Book it. The reservations page has both booking routes on it, and for anything with a shape to it — a birthday, six people, a table you actually need at a specific time — the phone is more reliable than a widget.

Weekend brunch, 11am to 2.30pm Saturday and Sunday, is the tightest service we run, because it is three and a half hours long and only happens twice a week. If brunch is the plan, treat it like a dinner booking rather than a drop-in.

Sunday dinner is quietly one of the better ones. Same 5pm to 11pm as any other night, noticeably less pressure on the pass than a Saturday.

If you want the full arrival logistics — which MRT, where to park, what time to actually turn up — that is its own post, and it will save you a lap of the block.

If Monday is the only night you have

Then we are not your answer this week, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

What we would say is that the neighbourhood does not shut with us. Swee Choon at 183–193 Jalan Besar runs to 2am Sunday through Thursday, and its dim sum is the reason half of Singapore knows this postcode. If you are already here and it is a Monday, our Jalan Besar food guide lists what we could actually verify as open, with addresses, rather than what a listings page claims.

Then book us for the Tuesday.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming Monday is a sacred craft ritual. Plenty of very good restaurants open seven days and do it well.

We are not claiming our team spends the day polishing grill bars in reverent silence, because we do not know what every one of them does on a Monday and we are not going to write it as if we do.

What is true and checkable is on the door and on our location page: dinner Tuesday to Sunday 5pm–11pm, brunch Saturday and Sunday 11am–2.30pm, 29 Hamilton Road. Eight services, six days, one day where the fire is out.

The menu is what those six days are for — including a Lebanese charcoal chicken the menu itself calls “45 mins of loving”, which tells you most of what you need to know about how we spend the open days. There are more pictures of the room and the grill in the gallery if you want a look before you commit.

If you have other practical questions — what we serve, what we do not, how the two venues differ — the FAQ answers them in one place. And if you would rather read how a five-year-old restaurant ended up with this particular week, that is in five years of Habibi-san.

See you Tuesday.