This Bar With Killer Cocktails Hides Among Makati's Girlie Joints

The Big Fuzz
2/F Creekside Mall, Amorsolo, Makati City
Instagram: www.instagram.com/whatsthebigfuzz
Open from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Monday to Saturday

(SPOT.ph) Kyle Quismundo only started learning to make mixed drinks in March of 2023, apprenticing at one of Makati’s cocktail bars. So it seems pretty wild that he and his friends opened a cocktail bar of their own by October same year. It is, at the very least, an act of pure chutzpah, entering an already crowded market with just a little over half a year of experience. 

But The Big Fuzz doesn’t feel like a place that’s still finding its feet. If anything, this small, hidden bar—situated among the Japanese hostess bars that line the Creekside access road running parallel to Amorsolo—seems to know exactly what it wants to be, serving confident cocktails with a classic approach to go along with its classic speakeasy aesthetic.

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The Big Fuzz hidden bar in Makati

The bar can be a little hard to find. It’s at the second floor of the Creekside Mall, across V.A. Rufino from the Mile Long Compound. What might be confusing is that the building has a mezzanine, and people have been known to search that floor in vain for the bar’s red door. There’s no mistaking that bright red door once you see it, though: it looks like the only fresh coat of paint the building has seen in a while.

“Me and my friends, we just wanted our own place to hang out,” Quismondo says. “A place that has the drinks that we like, the music that we like.” The music is sourced from a collection of vinyl LPs on shelves behind the bar, standing right alongside the liquor. You might enter and find them playing Gary Numan, or The Who, or LCD Soundsystem. That certainly stands in contrast to the music played at any of the seedier KTV bars of the area. 

This may go without saying but the cocktails are pretty different as well. Quismundo admits to preferring classic cocktails, and one certainly gets that impression on first sip. A lot of them are very spirit-forward, and lean herbal in the way that classic drinks do. See No Evil (P550) is a Jamaican Rum based drink that feels inspired by the flavors of a Negroni, forgoing much of the sweetness that tends to be associated with the spirit in favor of a tinge of bitterness and a lasting, almost medicinal finish.

Another one of their signatures, Pussy Willow (P550), is based on gin infused with Osmanthus Oolong, and is mixed with elderflower liqueur, leaning hard into a floral flavor profile that turns out much more complex that one might be expecting. High Violet (P550) is another gin based drink, with butterfly pea as the infusion instead. It’s mixed with peach liqueur, pandan syrup, and cucumber bitters. The combination seems unintuitive, but it all leads to another very balanced, classic leaning cocktail that starts sweet, somehow gains a tinge of chocolate in the midpalate, and then ends on an almost vegetal note. It’s confounding, but also delicious.

Their dedication to classic flavors doesn’t mean they aren’t experimenting, though. One of the most notable aspects of their current menu is the liberal use of dayap in place of lime in many recipes. Division Bell (P550) adds the local citrus to mezcal, aperol and maraschino liqueur, replacing the normal brightness of lime with something a little more bitter, and maybe a little more interesting. 

And then there’s the yet-unnamed drink that they’ve been testing out at the bar: a version of a Boulevardier made with toasted black rice and a brown butter fat-washed whisky that practically tastes like biko while still very much feeling like a classic cocktail. It’s a remarkable concoction that really exhibits the potential of this bar. They don’t seem to feel the pressure of being just one thing, or following the trends of industry. They’re just kind of doing their own thing, continuing to develop the place based on their own whims and tastes, and just sharing with the public what they themselves like.

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