A fateful drink in Vancouver led a couple to move to Manila and start a food business
Shoko Okagawa and Garrick Lim were both based in Vancouver. She was a hairstylist who moved there from Tokyo, while he was a customer who had been living in Canada for most of his life.
Since she was new in town and had a fascination for craft beer, she asked him what he would recommend for a thirst-quenching fix. Lim suggested the most popular one. She asked if he would go with her.
“He did, and that’s how our love story began,” Okagawa said. They’ve been together for three years now as a married couple.
In August 2021, they migrated to the Philippines to pursue something Lim and his brother had been dreaming of starting together years prior—a brewery. “We are into craft beer, and we saw how the industry exploded in Vancouver,” says Lim. Older brother Gerrett moved to Manila in 2015 and saw that it could happen here, as well. “Obviously, Filipinos love to drink, but they mostly drink the usual stuff. We want to show that there are many different styles of beer.”
When Lim got laid off from his job as a barista (he had been working in the industry for 16 years), they thought of it as a chance to finally start their passion project.
Located in Robinsons Magnolia, the Treeline Ales (@treelineales on Instagram) tend to be North American in style, since that’s what the brothers mostly enjoyed in Canada. The taste is a lot cleaner and citrusy, whereas other craft beers found locally tend to be either on the bitter or sweet side.
“You achieve that through technique. We’re self-taught, but what we do really well is research. We try to always reconfigure things if something doesn’t taste right. We are very critical of our own stuff,” he says.
Daily ‘onigiri’
Currently, they carry the Fat Cat Pale Ale, the Cascadia Indian Pale Ale (IPA), the Gingerbread Cookie Imperial Stout, an Azalea main squeeze New England IPA and the Olden Sunshine Hazy Pale Ale, which topped the 2022 Asia Brewers Network Brew King competition, beating the older players in the group. They also have a sour ale, a particular style that only they do, made of passionfruit and guava and which drinks appropriately for this city heat.In the meantime, Okagawa continues to cut hair, not in her own salon, but in people’s houses. In between beauty commitments, she sells onigiri or rice balls wrapped in nori, an idea first brought up by her father-in-law. He thought that since Filipinos love rice and Japanese food, there’s no reason it wouldn’t sell well. And he’s right.
Her year-and-a-half-year-old home-based business called Onigirikko (@onigirikko_mnl on Instagram) grew due to word-of-mouth. She offered it to her customers who liked them, and would often give them to family and friends, and from there, she found herself busy doing onigiri pretty much every single day.
Okagawa makes them fresh in the morning, just in time for the day’s pick up. She has five flavors: tuna mayo, umeboshi, okaka or bonito flakes, and her bestsellers, soy egg and yuzu salmon.
There was a time when she even made a pork adobo version, which she promises to offer again in the future. At the moment, she only keeps a handful of variants on her menu so that she can really focus on the quality of her ingredients and products.
Moving to Manila and opening a business in the very competitive food industry might be a shot in the dark for this young couple, but the risk is definitely paying off as the two continue to do impressively good in their respective F&B businesses. INQFollow the author @fooddudeph on Instagram.
Angelo Comsti writes the Inquirer Lifestyle column Tall Order. He was editor of F&B Report magazine.
