Kai: The modern Japanese way

When businesswoman Doris Magsaysay Ho goes to Kai restaurant, she orders something not found on the menu. In fact, she doesn’t even have an idea what it would be. She just tells the two chefs, "Here’s my budget, cook me anything you want."

Kai chefs Gilbert Pangilinan and Mike Yap are grinning widely as they tell this story. Not even in the New York restaurants where they used to work did they have the carte blanche to be that creative. I guess it’s like an artist being given a blank canvas and the art patron saying, "Paint anything you like, I will buy it."

Gilbert says, "So we really get to play with Kobe beef, with foie gras and other ingredients. The best thing about it is that she appreciates the experimentation and creativity that goes into it."

Okay, so Doris Ho owns Kai restaurant along with super retailer Ricco Ocampo and super restaurateur Rikki Dee and super dad to a senator, Antonio Legarda, whose daughter Loren two weeks ago held a fab birthday party for him there. But according to Gilbert, some customers also do that. You see, Kai has specials of the day not found on the menu so things are always new, you just have to ask the waiters about them.

As for me, I wanted to do a Doris Ho, but the food on the menu looked so good, plus my husband wanted to try the hot stones (not for eating, but for cooking your own food). So we simply asked the waiter (or maybe it was the dining room manager), "What’s good here?"

She said, "Ma’am, the Miso Soup is good, also the Asari Saka Mushi soup, which is clam broth with sake. The Grilled Shiitake with mixed greens and maple ponzo vinaigrette, also the Goat Cheese Salad, and the Marinated Tuna. The fresh Oysters Granite or Wasabi Oyster Tempura, or the Hamachi Carpaccio. You can try the Lamb Shank or the Chicken Teriyaki or the Sea Bass. ..."

Waaaaaiiit a minute. She was reciting the whole damn menu.

That’s what you get for asking what’s good in a restaurant whose menu was developed by the chefs that were honored by Asia Society three years ago when it held its "Filipino and Proud" series. Four of the chefs who cooked for the fundraising dinners in Manila were then working at the chichi Japanese-Peruvian restaurant Nobu New York — Ricky Estrellado, Gilbert Pangilinan, Rex Soriano and Pierre Angeli Dee — while Mike Yap was training in French seafood cuisine at Cello and then at La Bernardine. Pierre is now working in Philadelphia, Rex in LA, Ricky is still in New York, while Mike and Gilbert are with Kai, (Gilbert has also opened his own restaurant at Robinsons Starmills in Pampanga).

According to Ricco, during the development stage Doris asked the five chefs to come up with something unique for Kai. "We don’t want to be compared or identified with any other restaurant," says Ricco.

Kai at Greenbelt 2 is a restaurant with a lot of modern Japanese dishes and some traditional ones. It has the all-time favorites that people love like sushi, sashimi, tempura and chicken teriyaki. On the other hand, it also has innovative dishes using Japanese ingredients that are cooked and presented the western way. Think Japanese meets French cooking. Think Australian Lamb Shank braised in red miso and served with a sweet potato puree; Nagasaki-style Braised Pork with saffron rice cake; Butaca Kakuni or pork belly cooked from eight to 12 hours!; the bestselling Wasabi Oyster Tempura deep-fried and served with balsamic dynamite sauce ("dynamite," is a Japanese sauce made of mayonnaise and pureed onion; for Kai they added one more ingredient: Balsamic vinegar).

If you’re the type who simply wants to do your own cooking, you can do that too. Order the Black Angus Ishiyaki or Kobe, which comes thinly sliced with hot stones for cooking and three sauces.

Mike Yap quips, "It’s fun for the customers and it’s less burden on us to be sending them raw meat."

He’s right. It is fun. My husband and I tried the black angus with hot stones and argued all the way to dessert which sauce was the best.

Follow these dishes with exciting desserts concocted by pastry chefs Rachel Gonzales and Pinky Gutierrez, such as Tofu Cheesecake, which tastes like a regular cheesecake but with the texture and a hint of tofu; the Trio of Crème Brulee served in bite sizes — chocolate, citrus and green tea-flavored; Wasabi Tiramisu, which is served in a cocktail glass — it’s not wasabi-hot, I assure you, but rather sweet and creamy; and Pumpkin Mini Pancakes a la Mode (homemade vanilla) with sweet red beans.

Why a fine-dining Japanese restaurant this time? After all, Ricco Ocampo and Rikki Dee’s partnership has proven to be successful with casual dining places such as Kitchen and O’Sake, Mangan and Ebun (with Maritel Nievera), and Rikki’s own W steak house.

"Because of the expertise of our five chefs," says Ricco. "Plus, we know that Filipinos love Japanese food and we wanted to experiment with non-traditional Japanese cuisine. We didn’t want to be very expensive, at the same time we didn’t want to be very casual. We wanted to target the mid to high-end market."

This expertise that Ricco is talking about was born from years of hard work and studying at the best schools abroad — the Culinary Institute of America and the New York Restaurant School.

Mike and Gilbert relate that working in kitchens abroad virtually wiped out their social life. Mike laughs when he says, "Working in New York was a really great learning experience for me but it was pretty tough. Sometimes you’d ask yourself: Why are you doing this? You’re working Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and your friends are out partying. At 1 a.m., you find yourself in the kitchen cleaning up. But it’s also rewarding. You feel a great sense of satisfaction at the end of the night when you know you worked hard with people sharing the same interest in good food. You just can’t beat that for me. Also, the kitchen life...when you’re cooking on the line and you get so many orders from the dining room, it’s very exciting. You get an adrenaline rush."

Gilbert adds that when he worked in London with German chefs, he would have 19-hour days while in New York, "for some reason you’re always running around. If you’re not cooking, you’re cleaning up — you have to be moving."

The rewards of cooking make up for those exhausting hours on their feet. "It’s when people tell you that they had an excellent dining experience. For me, that’s it. I just want to share my food with everyone."

This kind of perfection has its price, literally and figuratively. When Kai opened for the first time to the public, it was Valentine’s Day. It was a packed house. The following weekend, it was even busier, says Gilbert. "We had to turn away some customers sa door pa lang. We’d rather lose the customers right there and they would come back next time, rather than let them in and they would never come back."

Ricco agrees and adds it was the chefs that chose the location of the restaurant, never mind if they couldn’t put additional tables out front like those on the other side of Greenbelt 2. "I think our chefs would rather serve excellently few customers than serve so many people and then be mediocre. We want to please everybody."

Kai seems to be doing just that since it opened. When we asked the bubbly manager which famous personalities have been to Kai, he ticked off who’s who in Philippine showbiz, politics and business: Dolphy and Zsa Zsa Padilla, Paz Yuchengco, Peping and Tingting Cojuangco, Senator Loren Legarda, Kris Aquino, Piolo Pascual, Sofia and Patsy Zobel, Pops Fernandez, Tito and Maritz Yuchengco, Bubuy and Libeth Virata, Trish Cu-Unjieng, Senator Manny Villar, Irene Marcos, Monique Villonco, Maja Olivares, Simon Paterno, Gianna Montinola, Bea Zobel, Mikee Cojuangco, Robina Gokongwei-Pe, Ricardo and Gabby Po.

You know why Japanese cuisine appeals to me? It’s because it’s great meal food with an interesting manner of being served," says Ricco. "We wanted the whole experience to be the attraction of Kai — the purity of the food, the artistry of the presentation, that’s why we asked designer Anna Sy to make the interiors very simple. We wanted the eating experience to be the canvas of the place."

Gilbert Pangilinan says, "I think Japanese is the most balanced in all the cuisines. In one dish, you get sweet and then salty. With the presentation, you get the artistry. I did bonsai when I was a kid. The height of the plant has three different levels: Hell, heaven and earth. At Kai, we also do that with our dishes: The food is presented in different layers."

Ricco relates that his wife Tina Maristela-Ocampo helped in choosing the dinnerware and glasses that were going to be used. She didn’t want a restaurant where the food came in uniform dinnerware, hence Kai’s were sourced from Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand.

Another thing that catches the eye at Kai are the fighting fish in square glass bowls on each table. Fighting fish are a solitary fish. The male species are so aggressive they’re known to attack even their own reflection in a mirror. In the wild (the muddy waters of Asia), these Betta splendens have enough space to keep out of each other’s fins; as pets, they’re often kept in separate containers (they do thrive in small containers without an aerator). The waiters tell us that kids eating at Kai with their parents sometimes put the fish together in one bowl and one fish ends up being attacked and it dies!

Gilbert chuckles and says, "Someone once said, animal rights daw. But if you put them together, they’ll kill each other! Besides, this is one fish that can thrive in a small container and even without an aerator."

Lucky fish. They’ve swam upstream from the murky waters to a classy restaurant.

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Located at the ground floor of Greenbelt 2, Kai is open for lunch and dinner, and accepts reservation for private functions. Call 757-5209.