Style maverick Cecile Zamora aka Chuvaness brings you a taste of young Japan
The newly opened Hamburg Yoshi at Verve Residences Tower 1 in BGC is unapologetic about being as Japanese as it can get. It serves just one kind of food, sells no coffee or desserts and the seating is counter-style—no tables, takeout or bringing home leftovers. That’s because style maverick and co-owner Cecile Zamora wants you to have exactly the same unique Japanese experience as you would in Harajuku or Omotesando, where Hamburg Yoshi draws long queues. And at just a few weeks into operation, the Manila branch is drawing long queues as well.
Even if we Filipinos have a love affair with Japan and are increasingly savvy about its cuisine, many travelers to Tokyo are not familiar with hamburg. As you may surmise, it’s the Japanese take on the iconic American hamburger, morphing into a large oblong meatball swimming in delicious gravy and served with rice rather than buns.
Cecile Zamora is a cultural icon of my generation, who know her as Chuvaness. This is a term she coined as a joke and is forever stuck with. I think of Cecile as the former fashion designer and DJ who wore Comme de Garcons when no one else was bold enough to wear such unorthodox clothes. Ironically today, when unorthodox is commonplace, she has toned down and found “the joy in looking normal.”
We didn’t meet earlier though we had mutual artsy friends. We attended the same convent school but were batches apart. We hung out in Malate when it was both fashionable and sleazy. She too wrote for the Philippine Star and even worked as an editor. When we finally met up at Hamburg Yoshi, we discovered that we had much in common and talked long into the afternoon, way after our yummy hamburg meal in regular and wagyu variants.
Cecile is one lucky Japanophile who gets to travel to Tokyo every two months. She owns a stylish cafe and cocktail bar in Shibuya called Tencups. Once, while riding a taxi, she spotted a poster of a hamburg meal. She went back to look for the place and, after trying Yoshikazu Yasukawa’s grilled hamburg with its demi-glace sauce on perfectly cooked rice, knew she had to bring it to the Philippines.
“I need this in Manila because I love it so much,” says Cecile. “I have a great team at Pepper Lunch and they helped make it happen.” No doubt the incredible success of Pepper Lunch, which also originates from Japan, helped convince Hamburg Yoshi’s creator Yoshikazu Yasukawa to accept Cecile’s invitation.
“My background is fashion and journalism, now I consider myself a food businesswoman,” Cecile explains. “I’m not a foodie, I’m not into gourmet food and I don’t even eat a lot. But I think I have a sense of what Manila will like. Everyone loves Japan, but the Japanese restaurants here are more old school—always dark wood and kimonos. That’s not the Japan I know, the Japan I know is Harajuku so it’s young.”
She points out that the staff are just in T-shirts. “It’s a young Japan that I want to bring here versus the traditional.”
The set meals offer a choice between the regular hamburg (my preference), the bestselling Wagyu Hamburg, the Beef Tongue Hamburg and a Skirt Steak Meal. There are options for the number of patties and are priced accordingly. All come with unlimited rice, pickles, miso soup and a raw egg whose yolk you can mix into your rice. The demi-glace sauce is set over a little burner to keep it warm and you can opt to add cheese which I did. The cheese is gooey and adds to the whole umami experience!
Cecile then explains that each meal comes with TKG or “tamago kake gohan” which translates literally to egg, dashi sauce and rice. You crack the egg into a device that separates the egg yolk for you and add that egg yolk to your rice with some dashi sauce. Next, your hamburg will be served one at a time as they are cooked. Just as in Japan, where tempura would be served to you a piece at a time instead of five pieces all at once, you are meant to enjoy the meat while it is hot. This is the reason why there is no takeout or wrapping up of leftovers.
Likewise, the counter seating can seem anti-social to us gregarious Filipinos. But to eat at the counter is quintessentially Japanese. “It’s a Japanese style because often they will be dining alone,” Cecile says.
But it is the food itself that founder Yoshikazu Yasukawa is most concerned with, that it should taste exactly the same as at his restaurants in Japan (and now also in Taiwan and South Korea.) The meat is sourced from Australia and not pre-ground for optimum flavor. But the other ingredients here taste differently from back in Tokyo. So Yoshikazu, who came for two weeks to oversee the opening, even closed the restaurant for one day and reworked everything until he was satisfied with the taste.
And how did the multi-hyphenate end up with the moniker Chuvaness?
“Remember the Taiwanese TV show Meteor Garden? There was an actor named Vanness Wu, he was one of the gang members,” recalls Cecile. “So…Chuvanness! It was like a joke but it stuck. I hated it so much. Friends like Chito Vijandre and Ricky Toledo would call me that and I told them to stop because I said it was so baduy. But they said. ‘We love it, it’s so funny!’”
Whether you think of Cecile Zamora as Chuvaness or even Hamburgirl, you’ve got an original thinker with a soft spot under the armor of fashion. I can’t wait to get back to Hamburg Yoshi with family in tow because I know they will love it, and I plan to go during the off hours of the afternoon to avoid the queue. But I wouldn’t mind heading back alone either, so we can continue our conversation where we left off.
