Name: Behind the Counter at a local Japanese Hamburger Shop
Uploaded: 2025-10-13T07:44:40.000Z
Duration: 13 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The other day, I made a video about a Japanese burger shop and I messed up.

It's one of my favorite burger spots in Tokyo.

Adverbs of degree

But I completely failed to mention some very important things.

I haven't been able to get it out of my mind for months.

So I'm going back to Shibuya to go behind the counter at Chillmatic.

It's a Japanese craft burger shop located in the Okushibu area offering a one of a kind burger using aged beef with deep umami topped with an irresistible homemade pastrami.

There's nothing like it, but there's a story that you don't know.

That's the owner and head chef, Shioda san.

So the shop originally opened three years ago on the first floor of Mustard Hotel in Shibuya.

This is when I first discovered it and fell in love with their burgers.

Unfortunately, the hotel had to close down just after a year, which forced him to move out and set up pop up shops for an entire year until finally settling at this loc.

The first thing he does is prepare the kitchen and clean the whole entire place.

So here's one of the many things that I failed to share the first time.

Shoda san was originally from Tokyo and his father was a French chef while his grandmother's family ran a high end Ryote restaurant in Kyoto.

Naturally drawn to cooking from a young age, he he dove straight into the world of French cuisine just after high school, spending the next 11 years honing his skills to master the cuisine.

Hey, I don't see many chefs in Japan with tattoos.

Apparently, tiger and dragon tattoos are often drawn together in Japan.

Well now he slices the buns, preferring a brioche with a good amount of sweetness and texture to balance out the strong umami from their meat.

Apparently his friends own bars in Shibuya, so he often visits them for drinks.

They make a pale ale and tangerine in collaboration with an orange juice maker in Ehime and Kamozi Brewery in Itoshima.

He says that being in the food industry while also living in Shibuya has allowed him to also develop many connections in the fashion industry, leading to various collaborations which he enjoys.

Now he prepares the meat for their handcrafted pastrami used in their iconic burger.

He discovered a new passion for meat when he moved on from French cuisine to work at the Burn, a New York style grill in Aoyama known for their aged meat and pastrami.

Here he also developed a deep appreciation for American food culture, which would eventually inspire him to create his own high quality style food, but

in a more casual and relaxed restaurant atmosphere.

So what do you do when you're not working?

He says that he worked at a cafe bar in Harajuku for seven years.

And he was in between jobs looking for real estate to spend start his own restaurant and he was offered to work here.

How do you like it here and what's it like working at a burger shop?

So what kind of restaurant were you going to open?

He seasons the beef with his own original rub blended with nine different spices to help bring out the meat's natural flavors, marinating it for a total of about seven days.

When it's ready, he slowly cooks the meat to lock in the moisture, producing a pastrami like no other.

By the way, your father was a chef in Tokyo, right?

He says at one point, his father brought a group of his French chef friends to dine at his restaurant.

But for him, it wasn't about earning the praise from the chefs.

What truly mattered was a fact that his friends father had chosen to bring them there in the first place.

In that moment, he realized he was already good enough for the man he's always looked up to the most, his father.

I love how nothing goes to waste in this kitchen.

Have you been doing this for a long time?

He says that he and Shota San became friends at the bar he worked at, and

at the time he was thinking about quitting.

Shota San was also thinking about starting this shop, so he decided to work together with him to start the business.

So before we continue on, I want to give a quick shout out to the sponsor of this video, Squarespace.

Now, if you don't already know, Squarespace is the number one way to build your online presence.

In fact, I use Squarespace from my website, Tokyo Zebra.

Here are just some of the reasons why I love using Squarespace so much.

First of all, I've been promoting Squarespace on this channel for years now and let's be honest, they still haven't let me down.

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Behind the Counter at a local Japanese Hamburger Shop

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