Groups
Someone has to organise the group dinner, and tonight it's you. Six friends, or ten colleagues, or twenty family members including three aunties who don't eat 'anything weird'. Kampong Gelam is the right neighbourhood — generous sharing food everywhere, easy parking, Bugis MRT five minutes away — but only if you order like a planner instead of a hopeful individual.
Rule one: groups don't order dishes, they order a table. The failure mode of group dining is everyone ordering their own main — ten separate plates arriving at four different times, half the table watching the other half eat. Cuisines built on sharing fix this, and Turkish food is built on sharing more than almost any other. The meze-and-grill structure exists precisely for feeding a crowd.
Here's the formula we use for our own group bookings. Start with meze for the whole table — four to six cold plates for a group of ten (hummus, haydari, ezme, vine leaves), plus hot starters to pass around: sigara böreği and a shared pide cut into slices. This covers the first twenty minutes while the grill does its work, and it costs roughly six to eight dollars a head.
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Then the main event: platters, not plates. A mixed grill platter feeds two to three people comfortably — lamb shish, chicken shish, Adana, wings, over rice and grilled vegetables. A table of ten needs three or four platters, not ten mains. You get variety no individual order can match, everything arrives together, and the charcoal items eat best communally, straight off the skewer.
Budget honestly: for a full Turkish spread in Kampong Gelam — meze, shared platters, bread, one dessert per two people, and drinks — plan thirty-five to fifty dollars a head. Groups that skip the meze and go straight to platters land closer to thirty. Either way, platters beat individual mains on price and on experience.
Now the logistics people forget. Book. A group of six can sometimes walk in on a weekday; ten or more needs a reservation, full stop — and in Kampong Gelam on a Friday or Saturday, so does six. Tell the restaurant the real number, including kids. If anyone has a genuine allergy, say it when booking, not when seated. And agree on payment beforehand: one bill per table is standard, so nominate a banker and settle by PayNow in the carpark like civilised people.
For groups of twelve and up, ask about private space. A private room changes the evening — speeches, birthdays, office dinners with one colleague who insists on a toast. At LAYALI we keep the Sultan's Lounge for exactly this: a private dining room for larger groups, bookable with the full menu, open until 1am like the rest of the house. For anything above twenty, we treat it as catering — set menus, fixed price, no surprises.
The short version: book ahead, order meze plus platters, budget forty a head, and pick a restaurant whose kitchen is designed for the table, not the individual. Do that, and the three sceptical aunties leave asking when you're organising the next one.
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.