The restaurant community remembers Hiroyuki ‘Zama’ Tanaka, a friend and mentor

After 15 years, it’s business as usual at Zama, the Japanese restaurant just north of Rittenhouse Square. The sushi bar thrums with the happy give and take between chefs and customers beneath the luminous papier-mâché fish that hangs from the black ceiling. The kitchen slings Zama favorites, such as the soft-shell shrimp and the short rib braised in Kirin Ichiban beer.

What’s impressive is that the restaurant feels just as it always has, nearly three months since the death of its founder, chef Hiroyuki “Zama” Tanaka, at 53. Though Tanaka had fought lymphoma for three years — and was in the restaurant only periodically over the last year — his death was unexpected.

But it’s like he’s still there, his workers say.

“It’s weird,” said Travis Ramsey, who tends bar and waits tables, and, like many Zama employees, has worked there for more than a decade. “He always made sure he was watching — whether in person or on the cameras — and it’s just really strange to know I’m not going to get a text message from him, saying something like, ‘Tell those guys to clean something’ if the sushi guys were standing around.”

General manager Craig Weiler runs the restaurant day to day, and Zama’s wife, Shinobu, handles the books, as she always has. Weiler said Shinobu Tanaka, who declined to comment for this article, has no plans to close the restaurant, which has about 25 employees.

“He trained us well,” Weiler said. “We thought the best way to honor him was to just keep moving along and doing what he loved.”

Zama alumni are all over. “The city lost a chef,” said Phila Lorn, who worked at Zama before he and his wife, Rachel, opened the acclaimed restaurant Mawn in South Philadelphia. “I specifically lost a mentor.”

Hiroyuki Tanaka was 20 in 1991 when he arrived at Temple University in North Philadelphia, through its campus in Japan, to study English.

He needed a part-time job, and applied at Genji, then a popular Japanese restaurant on Sansom Street near Rittenhouse Square. Tanaka had kitchen experience back home, true — though it was frying burgers and baking pizza for American soldiers at Camp Zama, an Army base near his home in Kanagawa Prefecture.

At Genji, “Zama” learned from the Omori family, who started him at the bottom rung in the kitchen: scaling, gutting, and fileting fish. They didn’t even let him touch the rice at first, he told The Inquirer.

Tanaka climbed the ranks at Genji, heading its sushi and sake counter in the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel, before heading to Fish on Main in Manayunk. He rose through the Starr organization at Pod and Morimoto before opening Zama in 2009 at 128 S. 19th St. to stellar reviews. The Inquirer’s Craig LaBan called Zama “the best all-around Japanese restaurant to open since Morimoto.” Tanaka’s izakaya, CoZara, had a five-year run starting in 2014 in University City.

“Zama was someone you could joke around with, but you still got that look if you did something wrong,” said Ramsey, a 14-year Zama employee who worked at Pod when Tanaka was the sushi chef in the days the Penn Campus restaurant had a conveyor belt. Even after Tanaka was promoted to executive chef following the departure of Michael Schulson, Tanaka kept up his fun-loving demeanor.

Tanaka was a factor in bringing together the Lorns, now a restaurant power couple. Rachel Lorn, who met Tanaka at Pod in 2004 when she was starting out as a busser and barista, likened him to an uncle. “He was telling me I should be a server,” she said. “But I was very afraid of the old Zama test [for servers], as we all called it. He would ask trick questions like, ‘Is there chocolate in the miso?’ Of course, there wasn’t.”

One of her early memories was a lunch shift at Pod when a fake nail broke and she mentioned that she needed glue. Tanaka went across the street to the bookstore and returned with it. “He said, ‘Here, fix your nails. They can’t look messy.’ It was at the time where chefs didn’t really talk to front-of-the-house, especially a barista,” she said.

Rachel Lorn looked up Tanaka after he opened Zama, and started there as a manager. That is where she met husband Phila Lorn, who had walked in for a job. “I was a Cambodian kid in baggy pants,” Phila Lorn said. “I didn’t have chef’s shoes or a knife, and he took a chance on me. I don’t know what he saw in me. He told me a lot of insider information about being an owner, especially a new owner. Something I’ll never forget is, ‘Everybody will steal. Everybody’s gonna take a pound of butter home if they need it or a sprig of thyme if they really need it, but don’t fire them unless they steal money.’ And the average person would be like ‘What? That’s crazy. You’re giving allowance to criminal activity?’ It goes deeper than that. It’s like if you see someone and you nurture them, you have to be mature enough to look past certain things.”

Tanaka attended the couple’s wedding in 2017. When the Lorns opened Mawn in 2023, “he gave us our first gift,” Phila Lorn said. “When you step into Mawn, the first thing you do is step on the mat that he customized for us. When it showed up a month before, we were like ‘what is this?’ We saw it was from him and he said, ‘You’re gonna need mats.’”

Kevin Yanaga, who now co-owns Yanaga Kappo Izakaya in Northern Liberties, met Tanaka at Morimoto in 2009. Yanaga was sushi chef and Tanaka was a short-timer helping in the kitchen while preparing for the opening of Zama. Yanaga left Morimoto and joined Zama. “He basically convinced me to work for him because I wanted to experience the opening of a restaurant from scratch,” Yanaga said.

As Tanaka was a year older, Yanaga treated him like a big brother. “In the Japanese culture, when you’re younger, you have to show respect to elders,” Yanaga said. “He was a mentor to me: how to run the restaurant, that kind of stuff. He taught me to take ownership of things and how you always have to think about how to deal with the guests. ‘What’s the guest perspective, other than what you think?’ is what he would ask.”

When bartender-server Merci Lyons-Cox interviewed with Tanaka for a host’s job 13 years ago, “I remember that they had corn dogs because that was his favorite food and I thought it was weird that they had corn dogs for staff meal at a Japanese restaurant.” Tanaka asked her what her favorite movies were and what directors she liked. “Then we just talked about movies and that was the extent of our interview,” Lyons-Cox said.

The job interview also sold Craig Weiler, the general manager. Though there was no talk about movies or directors, “we had a great conversation,” Weiler said. “Just hearing about his passion for the business really opened my eyes. Like, ‘Wow this guy actually cares and that’s somebody I wanted to work for.”

Weiler said the staff knew about the cancer diagnosis and the treatment. So did some regulars. “He got sick and went into the hospital for the last time, but before that he was working up on the expo line talking to guests, just trying to get back into the swing of things.” Weiler and Tanaka never talked about a formal succession.

“He would just want me to just keep doing what I was doing,” Weiler said. “Keep things running, and do what you need to be doing.”

After Tanaka’s death Sept. 29, the staff felt the same way. “They want to keep doing what we do best,” Weiler said. “That is where we are right now. They loved him and they wanna keep doing what we’re doing here.”