Artichoke Pizza Parlor’s refreshed menu brings back OG favourites alongside new plates

If you’ve ever eaten at chef Bjorn Shen’s Artichoke, you’ll know that the food tends to arrive with a point of view. Since opening its original outlet in Bras Basah in 2010, the chef has built a reputation in Singapore for Middle Eastern cooking that is bold, a little cheeky, and never quite what you’d expect.

After moving to New Bahru in May 2024, the now-pizza parlour has just rolled out a refreshed menu — one that doubles down on what makes Artichoke tick, while quietly bringing back some of the dishes that made its predecessor so beloved.

Equal parts homecoming and sharpened focus, it’s a meaningful menu update that OG patrons will come to love.

Same spirit, different address

For the uninitiated: Before Artichoke Pizza Parlor existed, there was just Artichoke — a restaurant at Bras Basah that made its name as “the city’s least-Middle-Eastern Middle Eastern restaurant”, in Bjorn’s own words.

It was modern, irreverent, and genuinely unlike anything else in Singapore at the time: Mezze with attitude and Middle Eastern flavours, filtered through chef Bjorn’s distinctly bold and generous lens.

When the restaurant rebranded into Artichoke Pizza Parlor in September 2025, the pivot was real. The focus shifted to pizza — specifically, two distinct styles: The signature rectangular Undercrunch pizzas with their cheddar-crisped frico bottoms, and stone baked Rounds, with unexpected topping combinations that felt very much in keeping with chef Bjorn’s instinct for the unconventional.

The Middle Eastern roots were still there in spirit, but the menu had moved on.

The updated menu folds the old soul of Artichoke into the pizza-parlour context; fan-favourite plates returning not as nostalgia bait, but as a deliberate recalibration.

The result is a menu that finally feels like it knows what it is: A Middle Eastern pizzeria, in the truest, most chef-Bjorn sense of the phrase.

Of mezze and melted cheese

A meal at Artichoke tends to begin the way all good communal meals should — with something to pick at, while you settle in. The returning hummus (S$16) is a reliable opener, housemade from dried chickpeas soaked overnight, so the texture is noticeably smoother and more substantial than the ready-made stuff.

Topped with chilli oil, chilli crunch, almond dukkah, and a rotation of roasted seasonal vegetables, it carries more heat and more personality than your average hummus plate. 

Chilli lovers will definitely get a kick out of this appetiser; the heat gradually builds on the palate and lingers with each bite.

The garlic bread (S$10) makes for an ideal pairing — if you’re not ordering it alongside the hummus, you should be.

Built on Artichoke’s pizza-bianca dough and finished with an aglio olio-style garlic relish, it’s an understated addition that quickly earns its place on the table. It works just as well as a vehicle for the baked camembert (S$28) — a whole wheel baked until gloriously molten, topped with black truffle-infused honey and brown butter-roasted mixed nuts, served with Ritz crackers.

To say that this sits squarely in crowd-pleasing territory is an understatement; the impeccably creamy camembert is made even more luxurious with the truffle honey, which simultaneously lends an earthy depth to each scoop.

Then come the pizzas, and this is where the menu really stakes its claim. 

Of the Undercrunch line-up — with rectangular, focaccia-like pizza-bianca dough — the new Sunny slice (S$26) is the brightest addition — literally and figuratively. Toum, a Lebanese garlic spread, stands in for tomato as the base, layered with roasted fennel, haloumi cubes, fresh kumquat slices, hot honey, arugula, fresh mint, and pistachio crumbles.

The kumquat brings a citrus sharpness that cuts through the richness of the haloumi, and the hot honey ties it all together with a gentle heat. Its crisp bottom and edges are truly its signature; if you love a healthy dose of crunch in your food, you can’t go wrong with this.

On the flip side, there’s the Crab-Onara (S$34), a stone baked Round whose dough is fermented for three days before it even meets the oven. The base is garlic cream, layered with fior di latte, zucchini, pancetta, and crab-claw meat, finished with a sous vide “jellified” egg yolk sauce and pecorino.

The yolks — cooked sous vide before seasoning — give the whole thing a richness that reads almost carbonara-like (hence the name), but the crab keeps it from ever feeling heavy. It’s a more technically considered pizza than it first appears.

The dishes at Artichoke are built for sharing, as evidenced by the two large groups already deep into their meals when we visited. And if the above doesn’t seal the deal, the Super Bowl Supreme (S$150) certainly will.

We didn’t get a chance to dig in during our visit, but boy, was it a sight to behold — an oversized bowl layered with pepperoni pizza, meatball spaghetti, mortadella shavings, Caesar salad, and a crown of crunchy fried chicken.

The recommended serving is four, though we suspect it could comfortably stretch to six when paired with other sharing plates. It might look completely unhinged, but we can’t think of a better centrepiece for a group meal.

Oh, yes, please save room for dessert. The OG date pudding (S$16) is back, and its return is genuinely worth noting. Made the original 2010 way, it’s a warm steamed cake pudding built from dates — distinct from sticky date pudding in texture — served with cold dulce de leche, black coffee jelly, crunchy cashew caramel, and smoked salt.

Everything is made in-house, and what you’ll enjoy most, as we did, is the contrast of warm pudding against cold sauce, and the coffee jelly’s slight bitterness playing off the caramel sweetness. It’s a sweet ending that reminds you why it was missed in the first place.

Finding its sweet spot

What this menu refresh ultimately signals is that the brand has found its footing — not by abandoning what the original Artichoke stood for, but by figuring out how to carry it forward in a different context.

The Middle Eastern plates don’t feel like concessions to nostalgia alongside the pizzas; they feel like the missing piece, especially given that this is largely how chef Bjorn was first introduced to many of us.

Together, they make a more complete case for what this place is: A Middle Eastern pizzeria, and one that’s increasingly comfortable in that identity. For longtime fans of chef Bjorn’s cooking, that’s a welcome development.

For everyone else, it’s simply a very delicious reason to visit.

This was a hosted tasting.

For more ideas on what to eat, check out Merle & Co, a pet-friendly vegetarian cafe at Lentor Modern, and Moof, a home cafe that’s now located in a physical space at Shenton Way.