Why We Grill the Lebanese Chicken Over Charcoal

Our food menu runs to four sections and about two dozen dishes, and the word “charcoal” appears on it exactly once. Not on the pork collar. Not on the ribeye. Not on the lamb. Once, on a chicken.

That is not an oversight, and it is the most interesting thing on the card. A menu decides where to spend its words, and this one spent its only charcoal on the least glamorous protein in the building. This post is about why.

What the menu actually says

Under BIGGIES, printed as it appears:

LEBANESE CHARCOAL CHICKEN
(45MINS OF LOVING)
spatchcocked, green harissa, garlic-yuzu toum, sidewinder chips

Four pieces of information and a running time. Everything below unpacks them in order.

Chicken is the hard one, which is exactly the point

Fire flatters fatty things. A well-marbled cut sits over coals, renders, drips, and the fat that lands on the bed comes back up through the meat as smoke — the ingredient seasoning itself, which is most of what people actually mean by “it tastes grilled”. A pork collar is transformed by this. So is a short rib.

Chicken is not that. Lean, uneven, and built out of two muscles that want completely different treatment: breast that goes dry in roughly the range where the leg is only starting to become tender. Put a chicken breast on a grill and you will mostly produce a dry chicken breast with lines on it. It is the cut that most rewards a pan and a lid.

Which is why doing it properly is a statement. Every problem above is solved by refusing to cook a piece of chicken and cooking a whole one instead — skin on, fat on, bone in, all of it working.

Spatchcocked, and why that word is on the menu

Spatchcocking means removing the backbone and pressing the bird flat.

Cooks who do not use fire treat this as an oven trick for speed. Over coals it is not a trick, it is the whole mechanism. A whole roasting chicken is a lumpy three-dimensional object, and radiant heat travels in straight lines from a flat bed of coals below. The breast crown catches everything, the thighs sit in its shadow, and by the time the legs are cooked the breast has been ruined for twenty minutes.

Flatten the bird and the problem disappears. Every part of it now sits at roughly the same distance from the fire, the skin is one continuous surface facing the heat, and the fat that renders out of the thighs runs across the whole underside instead of pooling. It is the single adaptation that turns a whole chicken from the worst thing on a grill into one of the best.

The other half of the answer is skin. Flattened, the entire skin surface faces the coals at once, and skin over radiant heat does something a pan cannot reproduce across a curved bird: it renders, tightens and crisps evenly, while shielding the meat underneath from drying out. The fat has to come from somewhere, and on a chicken it comes from the skin. Take the skin off and there is no dish.

The 45 minutes

The menu bills it at 45 minutes and calls that “loving”, which is a joke covering a real piece of information.

Three-quarters of an hour is a long time in a restaurant. It is longer than most tables spend on their first two courses. Putting the number on the menu is a small act of honesty: this dish cannot be hurried and we are telling you before you order rather than after. A whole bird over live coals is a slow negotiation with a heat source that has no dial, and the cook’s job is a sequence of decisions about height and position over that whole stretch.

The practical consequence is worth acting on. Order it first, not last. If the chicken is what you came for, it should be the first thing said to whoever takes the order, and a table arriving late in the evening should ask about it immediately — which is one of the reasons arrival time matters here more than at most places. Fill the wait with the mezze board, which is built for exactly this gap.

The two sauces, and the Lebanese half of the name

The bird arrives with green harissa and garlic-yuzu toum. In the photograph on this post you can see both going onto the plate at the pass, the pale one and the green one, alongside the portioned bird.

Toum is the Lebanese garlic sauce: garlic and oil emulsified into something closer to a paste than a mayonnaise, ferociously pungent, and traditional with charcoal chicken across the Levant. Ours has yuzu in it, which is the Japanese half of this restaurant putting its thumb on the scale — and we have written about that swap and what it does at length, so it will not be re-argued here.

Harissa is the North African chilli paste; a green harissa builds it on fresh herbs and green chilli instead of dried red, which lands sharper and more vegetal. The two sauces work as a pair: one rich and pungent, one hot and bright, against a bird that has spent 45 minutes over fire. That is a Levantine grill plate in structure, which is where the “Lebanese” comes from. Why charcoal chicken has the following it does across that whole region is a bigger story and deserves its own post.

The sidewinder chips are the fourth element and they are not filler. Charcoal chicken produces fat and sauce, and the plate needs something to carry them.

What we burn under it

Binchotan, the Japanese white charcoal. When this post first went up it declined to say so, under a heading called “What we will not tell you”, because neither our site nor our menu names the fuel and we did not want to claim a bag on a blog that the kitchen had not claimed in print. The kitchen has since confirmed it, so here it is plainly: the chicken goes over binchotan, like everything else that comes off our grill. (Updated 3 October 2026.)

That is a fact about our fire, not a promise that the fuel is the secret. What binchotan does and does not change is argued properly elsewhere — it turns out to matter less than the marketing suggests, and the price of the stuff has its own explanation — and nothing in this post depends on it. The spatchcock, the 45 minutes and the two sauces would be the method on any good charcoal.

What we will say is that the chicken is the dish this kitchen would point at if you asked what the fire is for. It is the one that needed the method rather than merely benefiting from it.

We are at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar, Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. We serve pork and alcohol and are not halal; the FAQ answers that and the rest, and the full guide to Japanese food in Singapore is where the wider map lives. See it on the menu, see the grill it comes off in the gallery, and if you want it, book a table and ask for it early.