Culture
In the villages of Anatolia, you can still find her: a woman seated at a low wooden board, a thin oklava rolling pin in her hands, turning a ball of dough into a sheet so thin you could read through it. This is gözleme — Turkey’s most loved flatbread — and it has been made exactly this way for centuries, by hand, without hurry.
The dough is only flour, water and salt; the magic is in the wrists. Once rolled, the sheet is folded over fillings — spinach and white cheese, spiced minced lamb, potato, or mushroom — sealed at the edges and baked on a convex iron griddle called a sac until blistered and gold. Brushed with butter, cut into triangles, eaten hot enough to burn careful fingers. Street food, village food, grandmother food: all three at once.
That same dough craft runs through everything our oven touches at LAYALI — the hand-stretched pide, the lavash that arrives puffed and steaming, the flatbreads that carry your meze. Machines can portion dough; they cannot feel it. When you tear into our bread in Kampong Gelam, you are tasting a skill that was old before Singapore was founded — and we intend to keep it that way.
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Mediterranean flatbreads and meze
Everything we write about, we cook daily — 10:00am to 1:00am at 257 Beach Road, Kampong Gelam. Charcoal-fired, family-owned, five minutes from Bugis MRT.