Vicvic Villavicencio: Still the hands-down buffet king

Maverick restaurateur Vicvic Villavicencio made eating with one’s hands fashionable when he put up his Kamayan restaurant back in 1977. The trend caught on (or, in today’s netspeak, it became viral) and soon, movie stars, basketball stars, and society’s crème de la crème were spotted dropping all inhibitions, digging into a hefty pot of kare-kare or ginormous piles of sugpo sa aligue and asadong alimasag, and eating with their bare hands. The VIP guests left not so much their footprints as their handprints on Kamayan’s Wall of Fame.

Dads incredible!

In 1991, Vicvic opened Dads, the country’s first buffet restaurant, with its assorted offerings, which spread by word of mouth — contented mouths, for sure.

And now, Vicvic, with his children Pia, twins Mara and Cara, and Bokie, has put up the biggest Japanese-Korean buffet restaurant called Sambo Kojin, which recently opened its sixth outlet at SM Fairview (after Sambo Kojin Greenhills; Eastwood Citywalk, Quezon City; West Avenue, Quezon City; SM Southmall Food Street; SM Megamall Level 3 Atrium).

With the six-armed god of fire Sambo Kojin standing guard at the door, our appetites are all fired up as we swoop down on the resto’s biggest buffet offerings yet: Picture top-grade US marbled and tender beef and seafood dishes served fresh and spiced for grilling; fresh meats and seafood ready for grilling on the smokeless grill (yes, nobody has to smell the food you just ate); a heartwarming line of banchan (side dishes); over 50 sushi-bar favorites: kamameshi (Japanese rice dish), okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes), robatayaki (slow-grilled meat, fish or vegetables), katsu (breaded, deep-fried chicken or pork), and furai (deep-fried dish); and hot Korean staples like bibimbap (mixed rice topped with veggies, meat, raw or fried egg), chapchae (sweet potato noodles), and yongnyam dalg jin (Korean fried chicken).

“What we did at Sambo Kojin Fairview was we combined everything we’ve done and put them all in one restaurant,” explains Bokie Villavicencio. “We also added a big international area to the latest Sambo Kojin Fairview — a carving station, grill station, a lot of international food, in addition to what we already carry in the five other Sambo Kojin restaurants.”

One day, Vicvic and Bokie were sitting together at Sambo Kojin, enjoying a father-son moment, when Bokie told his dad, “Do you remember when we opened, we only had nine or 10 cooked foods (now there are over 200 food items)? And our fresh items were only two arms-lengths long?”

Oh, What A Grill!

Vicvic is mighty proud of his family’s latest “baby”: “Sambo Kojin is a unique resto. For one, it’s got a smokeless grill, which is very difficult to build. It’s an engineering feat to make smoke go down instead of up. And we opted to even improve it further. In the next Sambo Kojin, we’re going to have a dumpling station. You will see how a Korean, Japanese, Chinese dumpling is made. Our Megamall and Fairview branches have the best dessert selections. We’re getting professionals to redo our desserts; Mara is in charge of that. Our restaurants are big because even the baking is done on-site although the ovens are hidden from sight.”

Sambo Kojin Fairview, which can seat 450 persons, is the biggest Sambo Kojin restaurant so far. At its recent inauguration, there were 400 to 500 people waiting outside hours before it opened its doors.

As a restaurateur who never stops learning, Vicvic admits he learned something from doing buffets. “We could never get the quality of buffet food as short-order food however we tried. Buffet food should be newly cooked. It should be hot if it’s designed to be hot and cold if it should be cold. And it must also be fresh.”

He adds with knitted eyebrows, “The most irritating thing about buffets is they refill very slowly. Because some of them don’t know their job, others do it on purpose. The expensive items get refilled very slowly in order to keep the cost down. That is something we don’t do in our restaurants.”

Vicvic elaborates, “Here’s the difference between us and everybody else: First of all, ever since I went into the buffet business, we’ve had different prices for different times. Holidays and Sundays are different, Monday to Friday are different. The prices are lower for Monday to Friday lunch for obvious reasons — we want to attract people during the slow hours. In the evening, it’s higher because there are more people. But we have never, never removed items from our buffet. Even if it’s cheaper for you to eat lunch on Monday than Sunday, whatever food you’ll eat Monday lunch is the same that you’ll eat Sunday lunch. That goes for all our buffets. For us, a discount is a discount. I will give you a discount; I will also discount the food. That’s why we think we’re the most honest, the most fair.”

Yes, There’s No Service Charge

Here’s more: Value for money is relative, according to Vicvic. For what you’re paying, you’re getting more at Vicvic’s restaurants. “There are many buffets above us, hotels, some other buffet chains,” Vicvic notes. “I’m allergic to a number — 9. Our most expensive buffet is only P888. We’re one of the few buffets that don’t have service charge because that’s been my policy for a long time. I think service is part of our work — why be forced to pay for bad service? You pay service charge for good service, but it’s up to you.”

Having pioneered the buffet, Dads taught us a mouthful: That it was good value to finish your food. “After Dads, different versions of our buffet came up,” Vicvic recalls. “They gave you 50-percent off if you finished your food.”

Here’s another precious lesson Vicvic learned: “In order to have very good quality food, you have to build your kitchen right in front of the food, as you can see in our restaurants. So the guy cooking tempura is also the same guy refilling it, so he knows if it’s newly cooked, if there’s enough for the guests, if there’s not enough.”

Back then, the orginal Kamayan and Saisaki restaurants already had open kitchens. “I never hid my kitchen,” Vicvic asserts. “It’s a two-way street — the cook can see how many guests there are, and the diner can see what the cook is doing. So the cook is forced to keep the kitchen clean. I remember I used to knock on the glass, to alert the cook that his tempura has a problem. The thing is, it’s a matter of attitude. It starts with the owner, then the personnel. If it’s not quality, don’t put it out. Even if they have the same kitchens, you don’t know if the chefs have the same attitude.”

Vicvic shares further, “Because we have redesigned some of our restaurants, we are moving backwards to redo our old ones because in time, the next restaurant is going to become the improved version of the other one, and you will reach a point where the others are kind of left behind. So, while we’re expanding our restaurants, we’re in the process of fixing the old ones so they will all become similar, though not exactly the same. All my children are involved already, they’re expanding very much.”

One More Dream

Did Vicvic dream of building a restaurant empire?

“Yeah,” comes the quick reply. “I always tell my children that if they’re going to do something, make sure they’re the best at it because somebody is going to come around and be better than them and they’re going to lose, they will just be a passing fancy. I also tell them not to be afraid to speak up and give their opinions, to show if their idea is better or tell me if I’m wrong. That’s why my children are all opinionated.”

He looks back and says, “I think 39 years are enough proof that we’re still trying our best to be the best.”

The triple V in his name may as well stand for triple victory. He sums up the secret to his success: “We train our people well, we treat them well, and we pay them correctly. And we take care of our guests. In our business, the two most important people are our personnel and our guests.”

Vicvic hastens to add, “I’m against Endo (end of contract), I don’t like it because I want my employees to work hard so they can qualify and we can keep them long, if not forever.”

He says with a chuckle, “Some of our employees have stayed with us for a long time and like me, they have no more hair and are very fat!”

It’s no secret that Vicvic loves to pamper his guests. For instance, his buffet restaurants have a bar (refillable, interchangeable soft drinks and juices), but guests don’t have to go to the bar because they can have their drinks delivered to their tables. Vicvic reasons that if a customer pays over P800 for his food, you don’t expect him to stand up and get his drinks.

Certainly, Vicvic’s restaurants have become a favorite venue for celebrating many a milestone. At Sambo Kojin alone, some 50 to 100 birthdays are celebrated every day. And the celebrant can celebrate his/her birthday for a whole week: on the birthday and three days before and three days after that, during which he/she dines for free if accompanied by a full-paying customer. The free birthday buffet may be availed of 14 times, for lunch and dinner, within the said seven days.

Although he can now afford to take it easy, what with his children running the restos now, Vicvic still keeps to his daily workaholic routine: He’s up by 4 or 5 a.m. and is at work by 6 a.m.

He may be retired now, but he’ll never get tired of dreaming. “I have one more dream,” he muses. “I want to go back to where I started. I want to build the best Filipino restaurant that Filipinos can be proud of. It won’t be buffet.  When we started, the best Filipino restaurant was called Kamayan (which also invented green mango juice, which everybody copied). The best Japanese resto was called Saisaki. Now, if you want good Japanese food, you go to Ogetsu Hime (his son Veejay’s upscale Japanese resto at SM Aura), which is exactly like what the Japanese do, even better.”

He discloses further, “I’m looking for a nice place because I think Filipino food is very, very good, but I’m not into fusion — it may taste good, but to me, it’s fusion confusion, it’s not what I know.”

And we all know that Vicvic’s the best at what he knows. The king of buffets reigns supreme.

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The new Sambo Kojin is located at SM Fairview with telephone number 921-5177 and mobile 0917-655-6240. For updates and promos, like www.facebook.com/SamboKojin and @sambokojin on Instagram.