Hamburg Yoshi Brings Its Next-Level Burger Steak to Manila

Hamburg Yoshi
Ground Floor, Verve 1 Building,
26th Street corner 8th Avenue
Open Sunday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m, and Fridays to Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Visit their Instagram here. 

(SPOT.ph) After bringing Pepper Lunch to the Philippines and making a steaming hot plate of beef pepper rice part of the Manileño diet, the fashion designer-turned-DJ Cecile Zamora just shipped in another gem from Tokyo, her favorite city in the world. It is called Hamburg Yoshi and it’s the latest establishment to open within the Verve Residences properties in BGC.

What is Hamburg Yoshi? It’s a charcoal-grilled hamburger restaurant born in the posh Omotesando neighborhood of Tokyo. After gaining much success in its home turf, where it was an instant hit when it opened back in 2023, it’s now in three other countries: Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, with the local store opening to the public March 9, Sunday.

Zamora discovered Hamburg Yoshi just last year. On her way to the salon—always the first stop whenever she visits Tokyo—a taxi driver’s wrong turn would draw her eye towards a photograph of an oval-shaped burger patty on top of a bowl of white rice. She knew she wanted to eat there and did so after her beauty appointment. Needless to say, she loved it, and brought her back to her younger days of enjoying a burger patty, or a Salisbury steak, with rice.

What the Hamburg Yoshi meal consists of

The Hamburg Yoshi in BGC, located at the Ground Floor of the Verve 1 Building, is a no-nonsense dining spot with bar seating all throughout. Unlike most Japanese joints in Manila that tries to evoke an old world, traditional Japan, this one is contemporary. “This one is modern, this is Harajuku, this is Omotesando,” Zamora tells SPOT.ph. “I don’t go to temples, I don’t do tea ceremony. I like shopping. So this is the kind of Tokyo I like, it’s urban.”

The Hamburg Yoshi meal is definitely more than the burger steak meal we’re used to—in size, flavor, and presentation. The star of the show is a football-shaped 270 gram-burger which is placed on a bowl of fragrant, fluffy Japanese white rice.

A meal comes with pickled cabbage, miso soup, an original recipe demi-glacé that is neither too sweet or too rich as to overpower the flavors of the meat, and a raw egg which you can drench your rice with in advance, if you like. The gooey liquid just adds more flavor to the rice.

But what makes the burger special? “Our biggest commitment is to use meat that is freshly ground in-store every morning,” says founder Yoshi, or Yasukawa Yoshinori who is in Manila to oversee the opening and make sure quality and taste is just like how they serve it in Japan. “Most hamburger restaurants buy pre-ground meat and prepare it, but Yoshi buys meat in chunks and grinds it up in-house every morning to make hamburger patties. This allows us to bring out the full flavor of the meat.”

They also grill the burger over charcoal—instead of on the usual hot plate—which Yoshi says makes it lighter and easy to eat (despite its tough, packed-tight appearance). The charcoal grilling gets rid of the excess fat from the meat and brings out all the juicy flavor.

“Another thing we are particular about is the rice,” says Yoshi. “We always serve it freshly cooked, using mainly Japanese rice, blending the best varieties for each season, and serving it in three rice cookers at full capacity.”

Just like how it tastes back in Tokyo

Keeping to the original taste is a must for Yoshi. “We do not change the taste at all. As long as there are customers who come to our restaurant in every country looking for the taste of Yoshi, we want to maintain the same quality as we do in Japan. The flavor has remained unchanged in Taiwan and Korea, where it has been very well received.” He says he knows that Pinoys like a certain kind of sweet gravy sauce but he is adamant in offering Hamburg Yoshi’s own demi-glace unchanged.

A hamburger set meal goes for P795, which already gives you three of those 270-gram burgers, and P995 if you want four. Additionally, if you want more, an extra burger is P195 a pop. But can you actually finish three on your own? Well, it’s perhaps a testament to just how good the patty is that the formula has worked this long, and that they’re proposing the three-in-a-set meal now to Filipino diners.

There’s also a Beef Tongue Hamburger set meal which comes with two Beef Tongue Burgers plus a Hamburger for P769. We didn’t get to try the Beef Tongue burger—which sounds interesting looking back—but what we had a taste of is the Beef Tongue steak, which also comes in a meal for P795, and comes with two hamburgers. If you’re like a typical Pinoy who expects the tender lengua you bite into during weddings and catered birthdays, this ain’t it. It’s very chewy but also very flavorful but without the greasy mouthfeel.

The restaurant’s bar seating—there are no ordinary tables in the entire space—works very well for what the Hamburg Yoshi meal was originally intended for: solo eating. Owner Yoshi used to run a yakiniku in Sapporo for 24 years, which was favored by diners who usually came in groups. “The restaurant would buy an entire cow and use every part of it. So I had a lot of knowledge about meat, and because [we offered] a variety of different cuts, the restaurant was always full.”

But the Covid pandemic made business difficult for the yakiniku and this eventually pushed Yoshi to find a new location and a new business model. Which brought the Japanese to thinking of, instead of dining as a shared experience, enjoying a meal with one’s own company. Not very Filipino, you say? Oh well, you can always bring the barangay at Hamburg Yoshi in BGC and fill up a few chairs near each other.

Besides it’s all about that burger, which both Yoshi and Zamora take pride in. “Many Filipinos have already visited our Japanese stores,” says Yoshi proudly, “but we want to make our [overseas] stores into places where people can enjoy the same flavors as in Japan without having to go to Japan.”