“Some Special Kind of Olives”: the Art of Smoking Small Things

There is an item on our mezze list called “Some Special Kind of Olives”. That is the actual name, printed exactly like that, and underneath it the menu says: wood smoked olives, herb, lemon evoo. Our drinks menu opens with the line serious food, never a serious mood, and this dish is the shortest proof of it — a joke name sitting on top of a technique that is fussier than most of the plates around it.

Because smoking an olive is not like smoking anything else on our fire, and the reason is worth going into.

You cannot eat an olive off the tree

Start with the fact that gets skipped. A raw olive is inedible. It is loaded with oleuropein, a compound so bitter that it makes the fruit genuinely unpleasant rather than merely sharp, and no amount of ripening fixes it. Every edible olive in the world has been through a curing process to strip that bitterness out — brine, dry salt, an alkaline lye soak, or a long spell in changed water, depending on the tradition and the variety.

So by the time an olive arrives in any kitchen, it has already been through one long chemical process. It has been salted, its water has been partly drawn out and partly replaced, and its flesh has firmed up. That is the starting condition, and it is completely different from the starting condition of a piece of meat.

Which means smoke has almost nowhere to go

Smoke moves into food through moisture and fat, mostly near the surface, and it takes time because it has to travel. That is why a big piece of meat sits over a low fire for hours: it is wet, it is thick, and the smoke has a long way to go.

An olive is the opposite of all three. It is small, it is dense, and its water was managed out of it during curing. There is no long journey for the smoke to make and no reservoir of free moisture to carry it inward. Smoking an olive is not seasoning a piece of fruit all the way through. It is seasoning a skin.

That sounds like a limitation, and it is, but it is also the reason the dish works. Because everything the smoke lands on is on the outside, the flavour arrives immediately and at full strength on the first bite, instead of being something you notice on the third.

So the oil is the point

Here is the part of the menu line that looks like a garnish and is not. Lemon evoo.

The compounds that make smoke taste of smoke — the phenols that come off burning wood as its lignin breaks down — are fat-soluble. Put smoked olives into a bowl with olive oil and the oil does not sit politely underneath them. It pulls the smoke off the surfaces and holds it. Within minutes the oil is the most heavily smoked thing in the bowl.

Which changes what the dish is. It is not a bowl of smoked olives with some oil in it. It is a bowl of smoked oil that happens to contain olives, and the oil goes on to season everything it touches: the pita you drag through it, your fingers, and the next thing you pick up. Order it early and it quietly seasons the rest of the table. The lemon is what stops that becoming heavy — acid against fat, the same correction that shows up in almost every good mezze spread ever assembled.

Wood, not charcoal, and the difference is not decorative

The menu says wood smoked, and that word is doing work. Good grilling charcoal is prized for the opposite of smoke. Japanese white charcoal is expensive precisely because it burns hot, long and clean, giving heat without throwing much flavour at what is above it — you use it when you want the ingredient to taste of itself.

If you want smoke as a seasoning, you need something still full of the volatile compounds that clean charcoal has already had driven out of it. That means wood. It is a genuinely different tool, and a kitchen built around fire ends up needing both: one fire for heat, another kind of burning entirely for flavour.

The herb, and what the menu will not tell you

The line says herb. Singular, unspecified. We are not going to guess at it in a blog post when the menu deliberately does not commit, but the reason a herb belongs is easy enough to state: smoke is heavy, low and lingering, and it needs a green top note to keep the bowl from tasting like an ashtray. Fresh herb, lemon, olive oil, salt. Four things, three of which are corrections.

The same olives turn up at the bar

Smoked olives are not a one-dish idea here. Our signature cocktail list opens with Olive or Nothing — bourbon, olive, brine and soda — which the drinks menu describes as a reinterpretation of the highball, finished with smoked olives for a last savoury hit. Same preparation, different room, and a rare case of a garnish that is actually load-bearing: without the smoke, it is a bourbon highball with an olive in it.

If bespoke, off-menu drinking is more your thing, that happens at our Haji Lane sibling, Li’l Habibi, where the bar works without a printed list at all — we wrote about how that actually goes.

How to order it

Order the olives first, with pita, before anyone has decided anything else. They are the plate that sits on the table for the whole meal and gets picked at between courses, and, as above, the oil earns its keep the longer it stays.

They belong beside the other small salty thing on the list, the fire-tossed edamame, and next to the matbucha, which is the other mezze item that has been genuinely cooked rather than blitzed. Add the babaganoush and you have smoke arriving three different ways on one table, which is about as close to a summary of this kitchen as a single order gets.

As the line is written, there is nothing animal in this one — olives, herb, olive oil. If that is a requirement rather than a preference, say so to the floor rather than assuming, and the same goes for allergies. At the sweet end, none of that applies: the muhallebi, the chocolate kataifi tart and the matcha-misu are all dairy, and two of the three contain alcohol.

The full list is on the menu, the fire is in the gallery, and the story of the kitchen that decided to smoke its olives is in five years of Habibi-san. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Book a table.