O’sake to me, baby!

Rikki Dee’s sizzling love affair with food glorious food has been going on for the past many years. Fact is, this relationship, made in food heaven, has produced 60 – yes, 60 – restaurants and fast-food outlets that have all been hits with discriminating foodies. Among them are Chin’s Empress, Krocodile, Dish, Kitchen, Mangan, Ebun, Kai, W Steakhouse. And now, this consummate restaurateur has got a new (barely two weeks old) baby: O’sake at Glorietta 2, Makati. This early, like all of Rikki’s restos, O’sake’s proving to be a blockbuster, judging from its thick lunch and dinner crowds despite the fact that it opened without fanfare and publicity. Here, he partners with another certified food lover, retail prince-turned-restaurateur Ricco Ocampo. Ricco designed O’sake’s chic, neo-Japanese interiors, which belie the resto’s budget-friendly food. Everything is first class here, except the price (but more on that later).

Yeah, sake to me, baby! Rikki had his first belly-warming sip of sake (Japanese alcoholic liquor made from fermented rice) when he first visited Japan at the age of 20, not too long ago.

"At that time, everybody was talking about Japan – how great but how expensive it was," Rikki says with a smile as bright as the rising sun. "Since then, I’ve been going to Japan and everytime I’d eat in a Japanese restaurant, I’d ask for a sake."

Rikki just couldn’t have enough of it that he even went to the sake museum outside Tokyo to drink in the many intoxicating pleasures of sake. "I got to imbibe the much revered sake tradition of the Japanese," he tells us. "In Japan, the sake differs from one community to another."

He would always bring home a sake bottle or container to add to his growing sake collection, which is on view at O’sake (sorry, they’re not for drinking and certainly not for taking home as souvenir). The most expensive is a sake bottle that fetched a princely $US500.

And now, Rikki shares his great (earth-shaking?) sake experience with diners at O’sake. "We serve our sake like they do in Japan," he asserts. "Sake is served in a small glass receptacle which is made to sit on another glass container filled with ice. This way, it is kept cold without altering its flavor."

At O’sake, there are many different ways to enjoy your sake. Rikki enumerates, "We have mixed sake drinks like margarita sake, which we call sakerita; cosmopolitan sake or cosmosake; martini sake or saketini, etc."

Sake at O’sake comes in 1/2 carafe at P150, 330 ml at P280, etc. "I can easily finish three carafes," says Rikki. "It’s not strong, but it warms your stomach and it’s good to take with your food."

Rikki adds, "Originally, we were thinking of putting up just a sake bar. In Japan, there’s a bar that serves only sukiyaki, another that serves only sushi, and still another that serves only tempura. These are just small dining places. But then, we said why not a full-service, honest-to-goodness Japanese restaurant that’s got everything?"

How honest and how good? "When I went to Japan, I saw how differently people eat sukiyaki," he says. "There, you don’t mix the raw egg with the soup, and the beef is served separately, so while you’re boiling the sukiyaki, you put the beef in quickly. Here, we cook the beef with the sukiyaki– Kaya pala our sukiyaki is overcooked. Over the years, we’ve been doing the wrong thing pala. At O’sake, we do our sukiyaki exactly how the Japanese do theirs. The beef slices are very, very thin so they cook quickly. You can dip your beef in fresh, raw egg."

Then, too, in Japanese cooking, there are ingredients that simply don’t have a local equivalent. Rikki points out, "The katsudon sauce, tempura sauce, mirin – there are no substitutes for these, there are no short cuts."

Rikki had his first taste of Japanese food when he was 7. He practically grew up on unagi (eel).

"We were from the province and everytime we would go to Manila, my dad, Amado Dee, would bring us to Hyatt’s Tempura Misono, then the only Japanese restaurant in town," Rikki relishes to recall. "Aside from unagi, we would order tempura, which was really crunchy. One of the waiters then was the late Albert Seeland, who eventually became the restaurant manager. Then came Miyako with its eat-all-you-can tempura; and then Ramen Tei."

If Rikki wasn’t dining in a local Japanese resto, he was probably eating Japanese food where it all came from. "If you fly Northwest Airlines, you have a three-night stopover in Japan coming back without visa," Rikki explains. "You’re too jet-lagged so at 4 a.m., you go to the Tsukiji market and you’ll see all the fish jumping."

It’s no fish story that Japanese food is always on Rikki’s mind – and lips. "And hips," he adds with a chuckle. "I need to lose weight."

We beg to disagree. Rikki’s never looked better – and lighter. Is it because of eating healthy Japanese food?

"Japanese food is healthy – the way it’s cooked is non-fattening," says Rikki.

We heartily agree. After all, some of the oldest people alive come from Okinawa, Japan, where residents live to be a hundred (and to eat, drink sake and be merry).

At O’sake, you can order edamame, a plateful of snow peas (chicharo) for starters. Or try the okonomiyaki pizza made of cabbage, without crust, and topped with Japanese mayonnaise.

The seaweed salad is a must-try, with its red seaweeds and sesame seed dressing.

Bound to be a hot favorite is hot pot cooking (nabemono), which includes the O’sake beef stew and sukiyaki.

O’sake also has boxfuls of Japanese delights in its bento meals, served with rice, soup and chawan mushi (egg custard). For the main dish, one can choose any two of the shrimp, fish, meat, and seafood dishes on the menu. This filling bento meal is good for one person, but if you’re a light eater, you can even share it with somebody.

Also tops are the donburi dishes (rice toppings). There are oodles of noodle dishes to choose from as well. Tempura lovers (like us) will love the assorted tempura – shiitake tempura, shake belly tempura, kani tempura, mixed tempura, etc. If you like it grilled, there are lots of robatayaki goodies.

To cap a superb Japanese meal, there are great desserts, like coffee jello, wasabe ice cream, mandarin jello, green tea cheesecake, green tea panna cotta (our favorite), and fruit platter.

The most delicious thing about O’sake is that you don’t have to break your piggy bank (or rob a bank) to treat yourself to good Japanese food amid a great ambience. "There’s nothing here that’s priced higher than P300," says Rikki, flashing his million-dollar smile. "As for the interiors, we made everything clean and white because we know that when you’re eating, you don’t want any distractions."

Oh what a place, this O’sake!

* * *

O’sake is located at Glorietta 2, on the new restaurant row in Makati (near Park Square, in the same building where W Steakhouse is). It is open every day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., 6 to 10 p.m. with extended hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.