Last Thursday, as Metro Manila was drenched by rain, I walked into a shimmering Japanese village, complete with pine trees and pagodas.
And yet I didn’t need to fly four hours to get there.
All I had to do was step into the Hotel Okura in Newport World Resorts Complex, ascend five floors and the elevators opened to a three-story-high, palatial as well as quaint, so unexpectedly awesome I was soon looking for my jaw.
Awesome place indeed, despite its elegant simplicity is the Yawaragi Japanese restaurant at the Hotel Okura Manila, where some colleagues and I were invited by general manager Jan Marshall for the hotel’s first anniversary.
I was welcomed with a flute glass of champagne from Pommery, especially bottled for Hotel Okura. There are only 12 bottles for Hotel Okura Manila’s first anniversary, from a total of 2,500 bottles in Okura’s Ageing Cellar for all 81 Okura hotels worldwide. With the bubbly, I found my jaw (the better to sip the bubbly, my dear!).
“Yawaragi” means “harmony and to be completely at ease.” Yawaragi offers international gourmet dishes with Japanese specialties and Filipino favorites.
Its interiors are the masterpiece of a design team headed by Singapore-based Filipino, Joseph Cruz, of HBA/Hirsch Bedner Associates. Perhaps it is just me, but my experience of walking into a picturesque Japanese village had the familiarity of Filipino charm.
“Yawaragi is the depiction of a traditional Japanese village surrounded by a mountainous terrain,” says Joee Guilas, corporate communications director of Newport World Resorts, which Hotel Okura is part of. Incidentally, it was in Hotel Okura Tokyo that President Marcos and his delegation stayed during the former’s state visit to Japan.
The sprawling restaurant’s focal point are the intricate pine trees carved from Hinoki pine wood rising from the center of the restaurant, so detailed the trunks and their bases are gnarled, and the pine needles on the branches, so delicate. No two trees are alike, in fact, no two branches are alike.
The trees draw your gaze to the magnificent ceiling, which in contrast to the traditional features below, look like suspended scaffoldings. Very geometric. Japanese pagodas, like village houses, give the magnificence of the place that homey feel. Beams with a tilt form the roof of the pagodas.
For Hotel Okura Manila’s first anniversary dinner, we were treated to a feast that reflects the harmonious ambience of Yawaragi. The combination of seafood and grilled Saga Gyu rib eye in a five-course dinner was sublime, but not belly-busting, typical of Japanese moderation. In Filipino, you would describe it as, “hindi nakakasuya.”
It started with amuse bouche of cream cheese, black seaweed and eel roll with spiced pollock roe, gold leaf and sakura; King crab leg and pomelo salad; sashimi consisting of hamachi, salmon, tuna, shime saba and shrimp; a main course of grilled Saga Gyu rib eye, lobster tail with Japanese sweet potato; and dessert.
Dessert, under the baton of Filipino pastry chef Vi Serrano was described as a “Zen Garden.” It had an edible Hinoki pine tree (made of chocolate, of course), moss stones made of strawberry mochi, black sesame and wasabi chocolate pralines, toasted white chocolate “rocks” — all on a bed of fine “sand.” Tasting like crushed polvoron, it was called “biscuit sand.”
Aside from champagne, we had Pinot Grigio and Pinot Noir from Estate Wine to go with our delightful meal.
Another cause for celebration is the hotel’s occupancy numbers. According to Marshall, during the Holy Week, Okura was fully occupied. A 650-sq-m. Presidential Suite will soon be the hotel’s crowning glory.
I walked out of Yawaragi content, in harmony, but feeling little nostalgic that I was leaving such a beautiful Japanese “village” behind.
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The rosy numbers at Okura reflect the upbeat figures shared recently by Tourism Undersecretary Mae Elaine Bathan.
“Like we always say, tourism is more than just statistics. It is also about new jobs generated,” Bathan said during a press conference to mark Philippine Airlines’ inaugural flight to Perth in Western Australia. “A total of 5.2 million tourism-related jobs such as airline cabin crew have been made available to Filipinos in 2022, surpassing our goal of 4.9 million. This is why we want to be successful in our job because we want to have more Filipinos to have their own source of income and livelihood.”
As of March 24, there were over a million international arrivals. “Boosting our confidence that our 4.8 million targeted arrivals this year is within our reach,” she added. “The year 2022 turned out to be a good starting point for Philippine tourism with over 2.65 million international arrivals recorded. This was more than what we have hoped for, which we have modestly set at 1.7 million. That is almost 1 million over what we have initially projected.
“While these numbers may seem to be promising, the economic impact is far even greater as they translated to P214 billion or an equivalent of nearly $4 billion of total revenue for our country for 2022. Interestingly, this exceeds our target revenue by over 38 percent.”
I would drink a flute of Pommery to that!
(You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com. Follow me on Instagram @joanneraeramirez.)