Skewers and Charcoal: The Japanese Grill Tradition

A skewer looks like a serving suggestion. It isn’t. It is a piece of cooking equipment that happens to arrive at your table, and almost everything odd about a Japanese grill menu — the small portions, the strange cuts, the per-piece pricing — follows from what that piece of equipment does to fire.

This is the tradition our Haji Lane kitchen works in, so here is what the words mean, why the format exists, and what is actually on our own skewer list.

Yakitori is not the name of the category

Start with the vocabulary, because menus in Singapore blur it constantly.

Kushi is a skewer. Yaki is grilled. So kushiyaki is the honest umbrella term: anything grilled on a stick. Yakitori narrows it — tori is bird — so yakitori means grilled chicken, specifically, on a skewer.

Which means a shop calling itself a yakitori-ya and selling you pork belly and asparagus is, strictly speaking, serving kushiyaki. Nobody in Japan is upset about this. “Yakitori” became the everyday word for the whole format the way “hoover” became the word for a vacuum cleaner. But if you have ever wondered why one menu says yakitori and the next says kushiyaki when they look identical, that’s the answer: one is a category and the other is a category that escaped.

We call our list kushiyaki, because chicken is a minority on it.

What the stick is actually for

Here is the part that gets skipped. The skewer is a portioning tool before it is anything else, and it solves two problems at once.

It makes the piece small enough to survive the heat. A live fire is brutally hot at the surface. Put a whole chicken thigh over it and the outside is finished long before the middle is safe. Cut that thigh into six pieces and every piece has a short distance from surface to centre, so the outside can take real colour in the time the inside needs. The skewer is what makes handling six small pieces possible instead of maddening.

It standardises thickness. Threading pieces onto a stick forces them into roughly one plane at roughly one depth. That is why a good skewer cooks evenly across its whole length while a randomly shaped cut does not. The grill cook is not judging six separate objects; they are judging one object, and turning it.

There is a third thing the stick does that is easy to miss. It holds the food above the fuel with nothing in between. No pan, no metal, no conducted heat — just radiation and rising smoke, plus the fat that drips down, hits the coals, and comes straight back up as flavour. The seasoning is partly the food seasoning itself. (Why charcoal specifically, and what binchotan does that ordinary briquettes don’t, is a bigger subject than one section, so it now has posts of its own: what binchotan is and binchotan versus ordinary charcoal. Updated 25 October 2026: this line used to promise those posts; they are written.)

Skewers are how a kitchen sells the whole animal

Look down a Japanese skewer menu and you find hearts, gizzards, cartilage, skin, tail, jowl. Look down a steakhouse menu and you find four cuts, all of them from the parts of the animal that do the least work.

That contrast is the economic engine of the format. A skewer costs a few dollars, so a kitchen can put an unfamiliar cut on it and a diner will risk one. Nobody risks a whole plate of chicken hearts. Everybody risks one stick. Over a night, that is how the awkward two per cent of an animal gets eaten with enthusiasm instead of being ground into something anonymous.

It also changes how you eat. A skewer menu is ordered in rounds, not in courses — two or three, then a look at each other, then two or three more. It is a drinking format, which is exactly why it grew up alongside the izakaya rather than in restaurants.

Our kushiyaki list, in full

These are at Li’l Habibi, 55 Haji Lane — our smaller sibling, which runs inside Bar Stories and opens evenings only, Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm to 10.30pm. Prices are per skewer, read off the menu as it stood on 26 August 2026. Re-checked 25 October 2026: the menu file on our site is byte-for-byte the same one, so every price below still stands, and the opening hours on the Li’l Habibi page are unchanged.

Chicken hearts — $9 each

With preserved lemon kosho. Kosho is the Japanese chilli-and-citrus paste family; the classic is yuzu kosho. Ours swaps the citrus for preserved lemon, which is a Levantine pantry staple — salt-cured until the peel goes soft and the flavour turns from sharp to deep. Same technique, different lemon, and it is the clearest one-line summary of what this kitchen does.

Iberico pork jowl — $12 each

Twice cooked, fennel spice, bulldog mayo. Jowl is the cheek and neck muscle, worked hard and heavily marbled, which is why it wants the twice-cooked treatment: something slow to render and soften it, then fire to finish. Bulldog is the Japanese brown sauce that turns up on tonkatsu, here folded into mayonnaise.

Jujeh chicken wings — $12 each

Wasabi mayo, garlic oil, seaweed marinade, coriander. Jujeh is the Persian word for a young chicken, and jujeh kabab is the saffron-and-citrus marinated chicken skewer of Iranian grilling. The name is the nod; the marinade here is seaweed, which is the other half of the sentence.

Beef chuck — $14 each

Red harissa, ramen chilli. Two chilli traditions on one stick — North African harissa and the Japanese chilli oil that lives on a ramen counter — which sounds like a collision and behaves like a layering, because they are hot in different registers.

Mortadella — $12 each

Pork ragu, toasted pistachios. Yes, mortadella, on a skewer, over charcoal. It is the most obviously enjoyable thing on the list and it earns its place honestly: mortadella is already studded with pistachio and fat, so grilling it does what grilling does to any fatty cured meat, which is make it better.

GIMME ALL !!! — $50

The whole list. The menu’s own note says it “feeds 1 greedy person”, which is a joke with a true number inside it: six skewers is a real dinner for one and a shared starter for three.

Two honest notes. Pork appears twice on that list, and there is pork and alcohol at both our venues — we answer that plainly in our FAQ rather than leaving it for you to work out at the table. And Li’l Habibi’s bill carries 10% service charge plus 9% GST, which is a different tax line from our Hamilton Road flagship.

The other skewer on the menu

One item on the Li’l Habibi list isn’t kushiyaki at all, and we like it for that. ŞIŞ TAWOOK — charcoal chicken thigh, red harissa, konbu fries — comes from the other skewer tradition entirely. The Turkish şiş simply means skewer, the same word behind shish kebab; tawook is the Levantine marinated chicken it names.

Two languages, two continents, one word for a pointed stick and one idea about fire. We are not going to claim that’s profound. It is just true, and it is why a Middle Eastern-Japanese grill is a less strange proposition than it sounds — something we set out at length in our guide to Japanese food in Singapore.

How to order a skewer meal properly

Order in rounds, not all at once. Skewers are at their best in the ninety seconds after they leave the grill, and a table that orders twelve at once will eat nine of them lukewarm. Two or three each, then reassess.

Start with the fattiest thing you intend to eat, not the leanest. Jowl and mortadella set the tone for everything after them; chicken hearts after mortadella taste like an afterthought, and mortadella after chicken hearts tastes like an event.

And order something that isn’t on a stick. A skewer list is deliberately narrow — it wants a dip and something acidic beside it. At Li’l Habibi that means the mezze; at Hamilton Road, where there is no kushiyaki list but the same charcoal, it means the grill’s bigger jobs — the pork collar chop, or the beef, which is a whole conversation about marbling scores on its own.

Where to eat them

The kushiyaki list is Li’l Habibi’s and Li’l Habibi’s alone. Our Hamilton Road flagship at 29 Hamilton Road cooks over the same charcoal and serves a different menu — bigger plates, a full mezze spread, and a chef’s-choice menu if you’d rather not decide. If you’re weighing the two, or just want the wider dish-level picture, start with Japanese dishes beyond sushi and our notes on what to order at a fusion table.

The full lists for both kitchens are on the menu page, and the gallery will show you the rooms. For a skewer night on Haji Lane — where the drinks come from Bar Stories and the cocktails have no menu at all — head to Li’l Habibi. For everything else, book a table at Hamilton Road.