Manila’s Cocktail Scene Is Taking Hold In Unexpected Places
Belle Dinglasa/Bar.Flora
Manila, Philippines, is in a continuous state of flux, but Makati Central Square or MCS, dubbed “Manila’s most eccentric mall,” remains a constant. It’s a hodge-podge establishment strewn with shops selling cell phone accessories, children’s toys, guns, secondhand clothing, and crystals; located inside Little Tokyo—a neighborhood with a cluster of Japanese izakaya. It’s been an eccentric fixture in Makati City, Metro Manila’s central business district, since the 1980s.
“It feels immortal to me,” Kyle Quismundo who founded Big Fuzz, a hidden craft cocktail bar in the neighborhood tells me. “The whole area hasn’t changed in two decades.” Well, except for one thing: It's now serving up great cocktails.
After a brief stint as a bartender at Fat Cat, a buzzy jazz cocktail bar at MCS, Quismundo knew he wanted to open his own joint but one focused on rock n’ roll, inside the neighboring and equally iconic Mile Long property, a massive complex that used to be a popular business and creative business hub up until 2017. After a long legal battle between the government and a development corporation owned by a powerful Manila family, the Mile Long property fell into disrepair. Now, the half-vacant building is peppered with small Japanese restaurants and hostess bars—and, as of October 2023, Big Fuzz, Quismundo’s cozy but sophisticated bar serving drinks heavily inspired by New York City’s cocktail renaissance.
Big Fuzz and Fat Cat are part of a new wave of bars that emerged in Manila after the pandemic, and have helped transform its nascent cocktail scene—once concentrated in Makati and Bonifacio Global City, the commercial and financial hearts of the city—into a thriving one that is spreading out to metro Manila’s more residential districts. It first began with Blind Pig inside Legazpi Village in Makati, a classic speakeasy modeled after New York City’s famed Milk & Honey, which is often credited with launching the craft cocktail movement in the US in the early 2000s. Blind Pig was the first high-end cocktail bar to open in Manila in 2011. But while Blind Pig paved the way for the cocktail scene in Manila, it was The Curator Coffee & Cocktails that officially put the city on the region’s nightlife map.
Established in Legazpi Village by David Ong and partners Jericson Co and Bernice Tiu, Curator is what Ong calls, “a love song to specialty coffee and craft cocktail.” What initially started as a mom-and-pop bar and coffee shop equipped with a few plastic chairs, Curator has now become Manila’s premier cocktail bar, landing on the prestigious Asia’s 50 Best Bars list eight times since it opened in December 2013. The bar is intimate and understated with a tightly designed menu that keeps the place packed even during the week. Curator’s first year however, was tough, Ong recalls: “The market for cocktail bars just wasn’t there.” But when Curator unexpectedly landed on the Asia’s Best Bars list in 2016, doors began to open, metaphorically and literally; he started another new bar, Oto, in 2017 with his five friends—this time in Poblacion, one of Manila’s nightlife districts.
“If Curator was my Dr. Jekyll, Oto was Mr. Hyde,” Ong says with a laugh. Oto offered Ong the opportunity to play with ideas that he couldn’t apply at Curator. Martin Ledesma, one of the co-founders at Oto, said they wanted to put together a bar that felt like their living room: a good sound system, good coffee, and good cocktails. “After having the opportunity to check out nightlife in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, we realized there was a possibility to create more interesting bars in Manila,” Ledesma says. “With Oto, we wanted to elevate the idea of a third space.”
A playful “flavor first” and music-focused bar with a sharp yellow and black striped interior, Oto was the first cocktail bar of its kind to open in Poblacion. Before then, the neighborhood was primarily a red-light district with a handful of pubs and hostels catering to backpackers. The establishment of Oto triggered a wave of development, with the proliferation of high-concept bars like Agimat, Run Rabbit Run and The Spirits Library, from 2018 to 2019, that transformed Poblacion into the lively and eclectic hub of Manila nightlife that it is today.
A barman preparing cocktails at the Blind Pig, a speakeasy bar in Makati, Manila
After his speakeasy, ABV, located on Jupiter Street south of Poblacion, closed in 2019, Lee Watson, an early stalwart of the Manila bar scene, set up The Spirits Library in Poblacion. By then, the neighborhood had just the right mix of art, buzz, and grit. Tucked away on a quiet street off bustling Burgos Street, the area’s main thoroughfare, the bar’s unmarked entrance opens into a stunning space lined with vintage glassware, books, and spirit bottles from floor to ceiling. The interior is a nod to Watson’s self-professed identity as a “collector,” and the original premise behind the bar that every bottle and drink has a story.
The drinks menu at Spirits switches every few months. The upcoming menu will feature 17 craft cocktails from the Philippines included in the Gentleman’s Companion: The Exotic Drinking Book by American writer, Charles Baker, first published in 1939. In it, Baker details recipes of cocktails he drank overseas, such as the Barry Cocktail from Manila, a twist on the classic martini. “If you look at these drinks, they are proper, classically-constructed cocktails from the 1920s and 1930s,” Watson tells me. “But we often only look at the modern bar scene in Philippines from 2011 onwards, when the proper cocktail was introduced to Manila much further back, and then forgotten and lost.” Through the new menu, Watson hopes to shed light on the history of the bar and drinking cultures in Manila, stories that go further back than most people realize.
The growth of Manila’s cocktail scene, Watson points out, is now spreading to more residential cities like San Juan and Quezon City. (Metropolitan Manila is made up of several cities each with their own distinct personalities.) Recently, two of the founders of Oto, Ledesma and his brother Miguel, set up Raion, a cocktail bar with a focus on molecular mixology in San Juan, where they grew up, to offer more exciting nightlife options in a part of the city historically dominated by franchises.
In Quezon City (QC, for short), the most populous and largely residential city in Metro Manila, Lester Fuentes and his partners are also on a mission to create a cluster of higher-end nightlife options for residents who are tired of slogging through the city’s notorious traffic to get to Makati—a commute that lasts at least an hour on a regular Friday evening—for a good cocktail. Fuentes’s first bar, ReCraft, a slick open-concept neighborhood bar in QC, pushes back against people’s more uptight conception of a classic cocktail joint. It started as a pandemic passion project, but turned into an unexpected success. Realizing he tapped into an unmet need in QC, Fuentes and his partners soon opened Bar.Flora, a gin and tea-focused spot with a soft and warm interior, whose playful cocktail menu is underpinned by its careful tea selection.
While the cocktail scene in Manila, Philippines, has traditionally lagged behind its neighbors such as Bangkok and Hong Kong, Fuentes thinks it’s finally caught up. “Our clientele is well-traveled and exposed to the best bars not only regionally but globally,” he says. “That’s why we have to set up bars that can stand on their own anywhere in the world.” But where Manila bars are different is Filipino hospitality, he asserts: “We have been raised to be hospitable, and it shows.”
At Big Fuzz, Quismundo, as a first-time bar owner, is shocked at the overwhelmingly positive reception the bar has received within its first year. But much like its peers—old and new—Big Fuzz’s warmth, musicality, and connectedness to its neighborhood, to the credit of Quismundo and his partners, is what makes the bar a delight—and distinctively Manila.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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