Foreign-born hawkers bring flavours of home to Singapore’s hawker scene

SINGAPORE – Foreign-born operators are making inroads into Singapore’s hawker scene, bringing flavours from their home towns.

At Golden Mile Food Centre, Algerian hawker Yahiaoui El-Hani, 33, opened MareMyst in December 2025, serving North African dishes such as chermoula-spiced chicken and mutton stew rice.

In Joo Chiat, Iraq-born Omar Alnaimi, 55, also known as Peter Omar, runs Pete’s Mediterranean Grill at AlibabaR The Hawker Bar, a hawker-style concept that marks its 10th anniversary in November.

Here are their stories of how they are winning over local diners with the food of their home countries.

From Bejaia to Beach Road

When Algerian chef Yahiaoui El-Hani moved to Singapore in October 2021 to marry his Singaporean wife, his professional culinary experience helped him secure stable jobs. He first worked as a senior chef de partie at Spize restaurant and, later, as chef-in-charge at bakery-cafe chain Cedele.

He left Cedele in mid-2023 for better work-life balance and worked as a manager at a wellness centre for over a year. Then, he and his wife, Ms Nurulhuda Hamid, 34, decided to run a food business and operated a school canteen stall for most of 2025, while caring for their son, now three. The couple also have a two-year-old daughter.

At the stall, they sold items such as tiramisu and focaccia.

For Mr Yahiaoui, who became a Singapore permanent resident in November 2024, fatherhood was his main motivation for starting his own business. He wanted more control over his time, especially when his son needed surgery at 18 months.

In August 2025, the couple successfully bid for a hawker stall. By December, they opened MareMyst – which means mysterious sea in Spanish – at Golden Mile Food Centre, using $10,000 in savings and some equipment from the canteen stall.

They initially sold breads such as focaccia ($3.50 a large slice) and ciabatta ($4 for a loaf), reflecting his background in baking, but stopped in February when the natural starter could not cope with the heat of the hawker centre.

“I felt sad because bread is close to my heart and is a staple back home,” says Mr Yahiaoui.

He switched to rice bowls instead, adapting Algerian recipes to suit local eating habits. “I noticed the popularity of rice bowls and decided to take Algerian meat dishes and combine them with rice, along with roasted carrot and potato.”

One signature is the Chermoula Chicken Rice Bowl ($8), made with boneless chicken leg marinated overnight with English parsley, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Another is the Algerian Chtitha Lhem (Mutton Stew Rice Bowl, $8), in which the meat is marinated with paprika, garlic and onion and cooked for four hours.

“In Algeria, bread is the main staple, but in Singapore, rice is more common,” he says. “Other than that, we’ve made only small tweaks, such as thickening the stew for better presentation and texture.”

He describes the food as 98 per cent authentic, with the main change being format rather than flavour. The stall has drawn curious diners, many of them locals who travel across the island to check it out after hearing about it online.

Mr Yahiaoui, the second youngest of seven siblings, was born and raised in Bejaia, a Mediterranean port city in northern Algeria. His kitchen experience began at 14, when he did chores and later learnt the basics of bread making at an elder brother’s bakery after school. 

At 16, another brother who ran an eatery asked for his help. He started with washing dishes and peeling vegetables. Then, he progressed to cleaning sardines – a prized ingredient in their coastal city. At 17, he was allowed to work the grill.

His love and curiosity for food stemmed from his struggle with food allergies as a child. From the age of six to 12, he could eat only meat, pasta and bread, an experience that made him careful about ingredients and sensitive to customers with dietary restrictions. A surgery at 12 resolved his health issues. 

He later enrolled at Algeria’s National Institute Technical Hotel And Tourism, and graduated in 2019 with an advanced diploma in hospitality and tourism, with a specialisation in culinary arts and pastry. 

He went on to work in catering, hotel kitchens and industrial food operations. His last job in Algeria before leaving for Singapore was head chef for a gas company in the Sahara Desert, where he supervised a kitchen team of 80 that prepared meals for staff.

Singapore entered the picture after he was introduced to Ms Nurulhuda in 2017 through a mutual friend. They communicated through social media and never met in person. Guided by Islamic values, they got to know each other with marriage in mind. He proposed in 2020 and moved to Singapore to marry her in October 2021 after their parents gave their consent. 

Adjusting to life here took time. He had to get used to Singlish, a faster pace of work and flavours very different from what he grew up with. 

The work is demanding. He wakes up at 5am, starts preparing at 6am and often works 14-hour days. His wife handles procurement, accounts and administrative work, and helps at the stall for a few hours before returning home to care for their children.

The stall broke even after a month of operations due to careful cost control during the set-up. 

Mr Yahiaoui brightens up when speaking about customers who have supported the stall. “In the beginning, some people shared our food online even though they didn’t have to,” he says. “Without their effort, we might have remained invisible for much longer.”

If MareMyst succeeds, he adds, it will mean more than just business.

“It would be building a legacy that we can one day pass on to our children.”

MareMyst

Where: B1-22 Golden Mile Food Centre, 505 Beach Road

Open: 11am to 7pm, closed on Mondays

Tel: 8901-9722

Celebrating a decade of cooking Iraqi fare

Iraq-born Omar Alnaimi, 55, has rebuilt his life more than once.

He trained as an engineer in Iraq – where jobs were scarce after the 1991 Gulf War – and left for the United States in 1997. In San Francisco, he worked his way up from dishwasher to cook at his cousin’s restaurant. He later ran a limousine business for a decade and married his Singaporean wife in 2011 before relocating here.

Starting over in Singapore, he joined a travel agency owned by his parents-in-law, but soon realised his interests lay elsewhere. He missed the Iraqi food he grew up with and longed to run his own business.

Setting up a food stall was a practical choice and he poured in $50,000 of his savings to open Pete’s Mediterranean Grill at AlibabaR The Hawker Bar in 2016.

Signature items include Lamb Kofta Rice ($19), featuring charcoal-grilled lamb and tahini sauce, and Chicken Hummus ($15) – a plate of charcoal-grilled spice-marinated chicken served with a housemade chickpea dip. 

Born in Mosul in northern Iraq and raised mainly in the capital, Baghdad, Mr Alnaimi grew up in a close-knit family, where communal meals were central to daily life.

“I was always watching my mother, grandmother and aunts cooking,” he recounts. “I was fascinated by how ingredients change from raw to something everyone enjoys together.”

He graduated from the University of Technology in Baghdad in 1993 with a degree in engineering, but the years after the Gulf War were difficult and private-sector jobs were limited. He did not want to work in the government sector and decided to leave Iraq in 1997 in search of better opportunities.

He spent nine months in Jordan before making his way to the US, where he had relatives. In 1999, he found work as an engineer. However, the company went bankrupt after six months, leaving him unemployed again. With the weak economy, he struggled to find another job.

In 2000, his cousin, chef Yahya Salih, offered him a job at his Mediterranean restaurant Yaya Cuisine in San Francisco. Mr Alnaimi started with dishwashing and prep work before moving to the grill after six months. The long hours and pressure taught him the discipline of a professional kitchen.

“What I learnt from my cousin was not just cooking,” he says. “I learnt also how to run a restaurant, the system, the ordering, the storage and the cost control.”

A year later, burnt out by 15-hour days, he left the food business and joined a limousine service. In 2004, he started his own limousine service company with a friend and ran it for the next 10 years. At its peak, it made as much as $15,000 in revenue in a day.

Through that business, he met the woman who would become his wife, a Singaporean who was then working at her family’s travel agency in Canada. She hired his limousine service in 2006 and the two kept in touch. He visited Singapore in 2008, proposed, and the couple married here in 2011 before returning to the US.

By 2014, the limousine trade was changing as ride-hailing services disrupted the industry. His wife was expecting their child and wanted to be closer to her family. They moved to Singapore in September that year and he joined her family’s technology-based travel agency in a marketing role.

The work was stable, but he found himself thinking more about food.

“There is food everywhere in Singapore, but not the food I miss from home,” he recalls.

He could find Mediterranean dishes, but not quite the flavours he grew up with. Iraqi cooking, he said, relies less on heavy seasoning than some neighbouring cuisines, and focuses on bringing out the natural taste of vegetables and meat, often with slow-cooked broths and spice blends built around ingredients such as allspice. Meals are meant to be shared, with dishes placed in the middle of the table.

He decided to take the plunge and found an available stall for rent in East Coast Road. It was around then that he started introducing himself as Pete to make it easy for customers to remember him. “Some locals pronounced my name Omar wrongly, which sounded like they were calling me Ah Ma, which I know means grandmother,” he recalls, with a chuckle.

He opened his stall as Kebabs And More in November 2016 and later changed its name to Pete’s Mediterranean Grill for a more personal touch. He started with a tight menu of kebabs, falafel, hummus and grilled meats, working without a day off for the first six months.

“It was hard,” he says. “I couldn’t spend much time with my family, but I wanted to make the business work.”

The first year tested his patience. A staff member once walked out during dinner service, leaving him to handle customers alone during the peak hour. Some diners complained when food took too long, forcing him to rethink how he prepared certain dishes.

At first, he cooked everything fresh to order, but he soon learnt that speed mattered as much as flavour. He began preparing some items ahead of time and finishing them when orders came in. He did these while trying to keep the taste close to what he would serve at home.

“This is Singapore,” he recalls being told by his landlord in the early days. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

Nearly 10 years on, Pete’s Mediterranean Grill serves a mix of locals, expatriates and Middle Eastern customers. He describes the food as Iraqi at heart, presented in a Mediterranean style that diners here can recognise.

He launched a new menu in January 2025 following a yearly 20 per cent dip in business from 2023 after the Covid-19 pandemic. The new menu, themed on economical everyday meals, has boosted business by 15 per cent.

He takes particular pride in two dishes. One is Tashreeb With Falafel ($8 for lunch, $10 for dinner), an Iraqi-style dish of bread softened in tomato-based broth with chickpeas and spices. The other is BBQ Chicken With Rice ($8 for lunch, $10 for dinner), inspired by the grilled chicken and pilaf his mother used to cook at home. “This dish is my home on a plate,” he says, with a smile. 

For the former, he put his own spin on the falafel, which in Iraq is usually golden in colour. Inspired by those from Jordan, which are made with parsley, he adds fresh coriander and Chinese parsley – both easily available here – for added flavour and nutrition. 

“Tashreeb represents family,” he says. “It is a dish everyone shares. BBQ chicken reminds me of our grill culture, fire, smoke and people eating together.”

He worked his fingers to the bone for a year before he made $400 in revenue one day. “I was so excited, I called my wife to tell her,” he says, chuckling. 

It took another year for the business to break even and start generating a profit. Rising costs and changing dining habits have made expansion risky and he has no immediate plans to open another outlet.

He prefers to focus on his existing stall and keep standards high while balancing the need to be cost-conscious. Some areas he refuses to compromise on include using sumac from Turkey, which costs as much as $20 for 500g. He uses it to impart smoky, earthy and tangy flavours to his salad.

For him, staying open is an achievement.

“Ten years means survival,” he says. “It means customers trust you. It means you built something from nothing in a new country. Every plate I serve is a small bridge between Iraq and Singapore.”

Pete’s Mediterranean Grill 

Where: Stall 1, AlibabaR The Hawker Bar, 125 East Coast Road 

Open: Noon to 11.00pm, Wednesday to Sundays. Closed on Tuesdays