In 2023, 12/10’s owners, Gab Bustos and Thea de Rivera, along with family, vacationed in the city of Vigo in northwestern Spain. Bustos’ sister had booked the couple a table at two-Michelin star restaurant Pepe Vieira, a beacon of sustainable dining in Raxó village, nestled in between verdant mountains and the azure Ría de Pontevedra. On the hour-long car ride going there, they started playing a string of Red Hot Chili Peppers hits on the radio, just for throwback’s sake. Naturally, that had to include “The Zephyr Song,” blasting as the titular gentle wind blew through the Galician coast.
When the party finally arrived at their destination, they found that they were the only ones there — odd, they said, “for all the hype.” Then as their meal began, they were startled to hear RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis’s unmistakable voice booming from the speakers. Were they stalking? Did they do a background check? Were we on the set of Mark Mylod’s The Menu? The pair reeled over the uncanny coincidence, recalling the bizarre tortillas scene from the 2022 dark comedy.
“That music detail was quite intriguing,” said Bustos. “It just did feel like it was curated for the experience,” De Rivera weighed in. “[It’s as if] they did the research.”
But that was as far as the similarities went with the Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy starrer. Pepe Vieira, on several occasions, had been known for playing ‘90s to early aughties jams, at least according to a LinkedIn interview with its chef Xosé Cannas. His explanation was both ingenuous (“So they [the guests] don’t sleep.”) and practical (“In restaurants like this, chefs tend to play soft and classical music, but there is already a lot of peace out here.”).
12/10, a “non-traditional” izakaya concept smack in the middle of the metropolis, has always meant to be a casual experience but a “refined” one nonetheless — “nothing too stiff and nothing too unruly.” The space, designed by Greener & Partners’ Sarah Canlas, has the grace of brutalist forms. Chrome accents vaguely mirror the figures within and the energy of their movements. Proudly local paintings and photographs generously adorn the walls (from the likes of Raena Abella, Tristan Tamayo, Gel Jamlang, Ralph Mendoza and more): people and animals gazing at the room, supposedly to “make the people feel like [they’re] being watched,” said De Rivera, but less in a hawkishly intimidating way, and more like quirky, friendly attendants embodying the charming, personalized hospitality that the 12/10 team has prized since day one.
Even early on, De Rivera, as manager of front of house, has been in charge of the 12/10 playlists or would the help of DJ friends to curate the music. Their selections have touches of Balearic house, jazz, downtempo electronica; a smattering of soul belters and alt-pop deep cuts — even dancefloor warmers and fillers. They fastidiously assembled these playlists in the same way they pay attention to their guests.
“[The music] acts as a vessel for us to be able to deliver the experience that we want,” she said. “It helps us take the customers to where we want to take them.”
A seamless experience
For 12/10, music should have a progressive flow, similar to how their menu gradually becomes heartier in portions — from raw to cooked, with or without rice.
“When you create a playlist for a restaurant it doesn’t have to be like, okay, doors open, upbeat kaagad, [or] rap to make people feel like you’re young,” De Rivera added, drawing inspiration from a memorable visit to Amsterdam’s Choux, where the music transitioned from pleasant ambient hum to a more “full-on” sound as the place steadily got more bustling.
“We really keep in mind what stage of service we are at when we’re playing [a certain] song. So, it’s not just a playlist that’s on shuffle, [that’s like] ‘Okay, bahala na ‘yan.’ It’s really supporting the experience that you want to deliver.”
In a 2018 piece for The New York Times, music journalist Ben Ratliff examined how Ryuichi Sakamoto, the late Japanese maestro, made a playlist for the now-defunct Japanese restaurant Kajitsu on Manhattan’s East Side. “Your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu [桂離宮]… but the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower,” Sakamoto emailed the restaurant, bemoaning how “thoughtless” the music was. “A bad musical experience in a restaurant these days may be a kind of imitation of a thoughtful one, or at least a sufficient one: a good-enough one,” Ratliff wrote, pinning it on overreliance on a streaming service’s algorithm or on someone’s “self-absorbed choices.” He said, “As with restaurant food, so with restaurant music: Good-enough isn’t good enough.”
“It is very noticeable when a restaurant doesn’t have music,” argued Bustos. “It’s also quite noticeable ‘pag sobrang recognizable ng tune, like maybe it’s a radio [hit] that you hear… na minsan nakaka-distract din.” He acknowledges, however, that things run differently in, say, a sports bar. The bottom line is that context matters.
“We want you to know that [the music is] there. But we don’t want it to be intrusive at all,” added De Rivera. The sound, she suggested, should be “considerate for the type of experience that I’m there for.” For instance: a lunch date, a simple catch-up; even a meal alone without overhearing the next table, or someone losing their cool in the kitchen. Simply put, people should feel “safe to have a conversation.”
“I don’t go to a restaurant to hear music that I like na rin naman. I can listen to my music in my [own] time,” Bustos chimed in. “So, I’m curious about the sound experience that a restaurant would want to provide but ultimately it boils down to, I guess, if it’s something they’re conscious about.”
Should the songs simply be to the taste of whoever’s running the place? De Rivera said: “It’s not about shoving your personality into the customer’s experience but, rather, complementing their experience with what is appropriate with what’s going on.”
“It should be, in a way, a reflection of the restaurant’s taste. Like if the restaurant were a person, what music [do they] like,” Bustos remarked. “It’s more of turning your restaurant or your brand into a person and expressing from that point of view, not [your] personal interests.”
Bustos used to play the drums in high school, and was still very much a rockhead by his own reckoning — just into emo and techno nowadays, if anyone would ask him. A self-confessed fan of “girly” pop and alternative (Ariana Grande, St. Vincent, Metric, “angas women,” Bustos interjected), De Rivera grew up dancing, from ballet, the dance troupe, to the cheering team — which is a foundation that she attributed her musicality to.
“[Music] is like an inseparable thing from who we are now,” De Rivera said. “More so in the restaurant. We use music that we think would not only complement the mood or the vibe, but also music that we would like to work with or we feel like could help us be in the zone.” During preparations or once the customers are out, someone would switch the sound system to Aegis birit classics, UV Express jams, or even Chris Brown. “If that’s gonna make [them] sweep the floor, let’s go!” she jested. “I think anything we can draw energy from, we would really put pockets of them [throughout the] restaurant.”
Sensory Experience
Throughout the years, honing the “craft of service” — every little detail that goes into hospitality — became even more paramount for the couple.
Bustos and De Rivera were once The Girl + the Bull — a quaint, folksy gem in BF Homes, Las Piñas. Back then, alongside a rotating menu, they slung buttermilk fried chicken (a cult favorite) and “Faux Twix” (their take on the Millionaire’s Shortbread, a mainstay even at 12/10). As in the present day, Bustos helmed the kitchen, and De Rivera oversaw the front-of-house. Then, from its suburban origins, The Girl + The Bull moved to a bright corner of Makati’s Legazpi Village, and forayed into Korean-inspired cuisine (complete with banchan).
A decade ago, 12/10 first opened shop a short walk away from Makati live music mecca Saguijo. The Girl + The Bull later closed in 2018, giving the couple “more freedom” to run their younger brainchild. But in 2020, as with many establishments that became casualties of the pandemic’s economic fallout, the humble Guijo Street space shuttered in October of that year. But 12/10 itself — its heart and soul — was just set to go on “hibernation.” Exactly two years later, the team opened their nook at the posh 8 Rockwell, recharged and more equipped.
“We were able to take a step back and look at what we were able to do in Guijo, and sort of dream, when it’s time to open again, what would be the things that would be like non-negotiable,” said De Rivera, adding that while those were mostly operational matters, they also became “more conscious” about enriching the tangible qualities of a guest’s stay. Among others, this entailed tweaking the acoustics with curtains, blinds, sound-absorbing panels, and an array of soundbar speakers surrounding the room’s perimeter.
Before, groovy soul and jazz were on offer at The Girl + The Bull – a lot of Aretha Franklin, JB and the Moonshine Band — for the sake of “widening the demographic”; it was a way of signalling, “Hey, we like this music. This is the music that we listen to.” They’ve since moved on to more instrumental, “beat-forward” material, without vocals or lyrics to distract.
“I guess 10 years in, we kind of learned din ‘yong perspective [ng guests],” said Bustos. “That sensory experience for the customer is, I think, where we’re putting more value in now.”
Enchanted Island
Luis Gutierrez, the electronic musician better known as Like Animals, had caught wind of Ryuichi Sakamoto low-key tailoring a playlist for Kajitsu. He thought to himself, “What if I did that, but all stuff by me?”
As Like Animals, he was advertising his music services on his Instagram, and when De Rivera chanced upon it, she asked him if there’s anything he could possibly do for 12/10. Coincidentally, the restaurant was going to celebrate their 10th anniversary in October 2024, about a year after their conversation.
He proposed an original soundtrack.
It’s not totally unheard of in the restaurant world, for sure, but it was still a herculean undertaking.
Gutierrez has been a long-time friend of the 12/10 couple. They go as far back as The Girl + The Bull, where he was a server. He then helped train the pioneer front-of-house team at 12/10 when it first opened at Guijo Street. Bustos said he’s been linked together with Gutierrez since the start of 12/10, so working on any music project only makes sense to do it with him.
“I learned a little bit of everything in my time there. How to interact with people, what flavors I loved, and the warm feeling of finishing a shift after several waves of tables,” Gutierrez recounted his time working with Bustos and De Rivera. “We ate out a lot and were all at an earlier stage of figuring out what we loved about food and drinks, and it was really good doing that together.”
Gutierrez has lived in Palawan since 2022. His first sojourn to the “enchanted island,” as he called it, was in 2019 — a trip that inspired his 2020 abstract dance record Spirits Of The Land, which was his foray into ambient sound design. His Puerto Princesa home is a far cry from the tall, Manila skyscrapers he grew up in. Now, he’s surrounded by towering trees in abundance. His workstation uses boxes as tiny little desks, and he has befriended local fishmongers for the food he cooks at home. This simplicity that comes with island life punctuated his day-to-day life more than ever before. “[It] hits me in a different way,” he said. “Because more often than not, I meet my ingredients in a crowded market, and they were sold to me by people I very slowly get to know over the course of many palengke trips.”
To Gutierrez, food is both sustenance and leisure, which is what makes it “holy” to him. “Just like it was in ancient churches and temples,” he contemplated on the potential of the restaurant soundtrack: “The music was there to help people lose themselves and let something in from beyond… I think it can happen anywhere, and definitely at a restaurant like 12/10 where there’s so much care put into the food,” he added.
The resulting collaboration is six hours worth of music, split into four chapters. Chapter One of the soundtrack begins just as doors open. Guests come in to warm the seats; the staff slowly gets into the groove. With this opening act, Gutierrez traces the “journey of food and flavor into the love and consciousness of human life.”
This overture is named “Seven Gods in Every Grain,” lifted from a Japanese proverb: “in a grain of rice lives seven gods” — “a metaphor for soil, water, sun, wind, pollinating insects, clouds and farmers,” in the words of Australian food journalist Sofia Levin. It’s a reminder to honor the provenance of one’s food as it makes its odyssey from the land to one’s plate. At some point, there’s even rhythmic buzzing that evokes those beneficial bugs in the aforementioned saying, but later, it morphs into the whirring of order tickets churning out of the restaurant POS (point of sale) system. As it plays, service starts to pick up the pace.
The next section is devoted to 12/10’s Omakase, their 11-course tasting menu, and “the lives and work of people that work with food.” Bowed string instruments — reminiscent of kokyū (this is a Japanese-inspired spot, after all) — are tuned, then the beats kick in like the subdued tune of “Extra” by Ken Ishii, the Japanese techno producer. “Mise-en-Place,” the arduous preparations that ensure smooth service, marks the start of this chapter.
Part three is meant to play when the restaurant is on “izakaya mode” and the Omakase service starts to wrap up (the last call is at 8:30 PM) to accommodate guests who come in for the à la carte plates. Gutierrez dedicates it to “the fish, ocean, and people that make their livelihoods through it” — particularly the local palengke’s fishmongers.
“I had started picturing a Samurai Champloo-style anime about my fish guys [in Palawan], who had so much knowledge about the fish they sold,” he said. But the adventurous cues don’t stop there. There’s elements of The Book of Five Rings, a 17th-century Japanese treatise on swordsmanship and martial arts, and also “vague memories of watching the cooks at 12/10 through the past doing their knife work.” He suitably named the tracks after sashimi cuts: “Hira” (平), “Sogi” (そぎ) “Usu” (薄) “Kaku” (角), “Ito,” and “Iki” (活き). “A lot of them are metaphors or jokes relating to another aspect of the song,” Gutierrez explained his choice of titles.
In the final act, Gutierrez winds down his opus, just as the restaurant does. He has to soothe the guests and make it feel like the kitchen’s about to close. It’s time for the last orders. Gulp down that last tipple. He captures these images, transposes them into song, and also ruminates on “the diners and how the work of the team turns into memories and emotions.” Written between the bars, there’s even “a friendly nod” to his days working with Bustos and De Rivera.
Gutierrez’s material was in the little details: from the earthenware and glassware to the particulars of service — and of course, the flavors. “What I would do was I’d take those details and look into them to discover different angles,” he explained. For instance, an amphora-aged Yamagata wine inspired a track about “how it might sound inside that jar if [he was] the juice,” he recounted.
“To do six hours-long na original music, it’s kind of like doing a menu that’s really long — parang 30 courses. And to have variation in each track, to express yourself fully in those six hours… It’s really like a culmination of so many things,” said Bustos, calling the body of work nothing short of “a masterpiece,” not to gloat about the collaboration but simply to recognize the magnitude of Gutierrez’s efforts.
“You could see his emotions or state at the time were poured into those tracks,” he added.
There were a few back-and-forth video calls before the work was finally finished, and they went swimmingly anyway. Gutierrez sent drafts, and then Bustos and De Rivera would take them for a spin on the car radio on quick road trips. No comments; “Keep doing what you’re doing!” the couple would tell him. De Rivera remarked: “[Then] the next time the draft comes back, suddenly there are more layers. He keeps seasoning them with all these sound bits.”
Food and music share a vernacular that makes them not entirely different worlds, using words like “harmony” and “pace” to describe the execution these trades sometimes share. “[Cooking is] kind of like making a song,” Bustos mused. “May bass. ‘Di ba minsan parang ang kulang ng song ‘pag walang bass. If you just have guitars and drums, parang okay, like we got [melody or tone], may beat. Pero bakit parang may kulang? Where’s that bass note? So sometimes, the third note is essential in balancing flavor.”
There’s obviously art in maintaining balance in the entire restaurant experience, too. It takes being aware that there are many parts of the whole.“Just like the ingredients on the plate, [music] should be in harmony with the rest of the experience,” said Gutierrez. “It also shouldn’t distract from the food and wine but be a ‘barely there’ note in the whole.”
“Before this project, the music I made was meant to be the main course. You’d catch me onstage or find my work on Spotify, and that’d be what’s in front of you for the next few minutes. For 12/10, I wanted to be just one member of the orchestra.”
Like Animals’ original soundtrack for 12/10 will soon be out on Bandcamp. Special thanks to Dr. Raffaella Scelzi.
