Our Story
Guests ask us about the name more than anything else on the menu. Layali — ليالي — is Arabic for “nights”. Not one night, but many: plural, warm, and open-ended. The kind of nights that start with dinner and refuse to end on schedule.
In Turkish and Arabic poetry, the night is when the good things happen. The oud comes out, the çay stays hot, the conversation goes where it wants. The most famous nights in all of literature — the Layali of the Thousand and One Nights — were stories told after dark to keep a kingdom listening. That is the feeling we named the restaurant after: a table so good that nobody reaches for the bill.
So the name is really a promise, and we keep it literally — our kitchen runs until 1:00am every single night, the latest grill in Kampong Gelam. When the rest of the neighbourhood dims its lights, our charcoal is still glowing on the corner of Beach Road. Layali means nights. We simply built a restaurant that honours them.
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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.