The place is buzzing with movement. The bartenders are on their toes mixing drinks. Barkadas fill every table chatting with animated gestures and loud voices. Friends help friends who’ve drunk too much too soon make it out the door and down the three flights of stairs. A new set of patrons makes it way through the door to be greeted by the mural on the black brick wall: “Goo, goo, g’joob,” says the pipe-smoking walrus.
Just a short walk from the Ateneo campus, it’s no wonder that Walrus draws in so many Ateneans every day. With its laid-back beach vibe and colorful interiors, the venue is a step away from a period of dingy bars and Mexican cantinas and a movement towards a more relaxed and easygoing way of drinking along Katipunan Avenue.
Photo by Joshua E. Cabalinan
Beach beginnings
First-timers might be surprised to find out just how young the folks behind Walrus are. Five friends make up this group: Paola Betita (BS CTM ‘14), Emilio Tan (BS LfSci ‘13), Zach Riskin (AB COM ‘13), communication senior Joanna Kennedy and Braulio de Castro, a former art management student.
The idea to put up a bar was first born when the friends went on a surfing trip to Baler. “We were just having fun with the idea of putting up a bar, especially here [in Katipunan],” says Betita. “Then [Zach] and Jo came up to us and were like, ‘Guys we can do this,’” adds Tan.
Crafting the food and drinks for the bar took the team one extremely long and drunken day. “From after lunch all the way to like past midnight, we just cooked and drank cocktails that Jo made for us,” says Betita. “When you look at our whole menu, they’re all names we made when we were drunk.” The menu features an odd assortment of names; some are references to popular movies and songs, like Beautiful Chocolate Man and Cuckoocachoo, while others, like Calajosemarichan, are just plain random. “I don’t even know what some of it means,” shares Riskin.
Coming up with a name for the bar wasn’t easy. “Every time someone would come up with an idea, somebody would shoot it down,” says de Castro. Names like Honky Tonk and Fishbowl were thrown in. “Horrible,” comments Riskin, who adds that while the name took weeks in the making, finally landing on Walrus was more an accident than anything else. The idea came during one brainstorming session. De Castro explains that out of sheer mental exhaustion, he left the discussion to take a bathroom break. “On the ivory throne, the idea came to me—name it after a Beatles song,” he recalls. “I just came out of there: ‘Guys, Walrus.’”
From that moment on, everything fell into place. “We wanted an eccentric bar, an eccentric concept,” explains Betita. “We all love The Beatles, and you know, ‘[I Am the] Walrus’ is the most eccentric song of The Beatles.”
Setting up shop seems to have come naturally to the team, who also pioneered the concept of the progressive happy hour: Each successive pitcher ordered between noon and 3 PM gets P10 cheaper. According to Betita, “We didn’t know we were doing it until we were actually doing it. But if you have a good idea, if you have the skills—because we all have our own things, our own specialties. If you have a good business plan, a good concept, then the financials and the logistics…”
“It all falls into place,” de Castro chimes in.
Photo by Joshua E. Cabalinan
Staying afloat
Although brainstorming came naturally to them, the group found running the bar to be a whole new ballgame. Betita urges Riskin to tell the story of Walrus’ first day. “Because that was the craziest time for all of us, and you did most of the dishwashing,” she says with a laugh.
“So, as soon as we opened, 30 minutes after opening, our plumbing went out [and] our bathroom started flooding. We couldn’t wash dishes. It was packed on the first day,” Riskin recounts. “Since we couldn’t wash dishes, we had to wash them [with] distilled water!”
Even Riskin, who is formally Walrus’ chief of Marketing, didn’t anticipate how far word had spread by the first day. “I thought it was gonna be chill, but everyone was there, like, what’s up?” he says. “An hour after our water went out, we overloaded our fuse box, so our kitchen died, so we had to close down the kitchen for an hour while we called in some emergency electrical services.”
Even though that day ended at three in the morning at a nearby McDonald’s, the five found themselves back at the bar a mere five hours later. That was only a few months ago, but when the group talks about how the bar has grown, and how they’ve grown along with it, Walrus sounds older than just a few months. In fact, the bar has undergone so much development and exposure that the group’s main concern now is keeping it fresh.
Another of Walrus’ concerns is security; recently, there have been a handful of incidents allegedly involving unruly customers and illegal substances. In light of these, Walrus recently posted a status on their Facebook page reminding patrons to abide by the law: “Any misconduct or illegal activity will not be tolerated inside our space and will be handed over to the proper authorities.”
“We just want to keep it fun,” says Betita. “Every student that graduates, they want to put up a bar and they want to do it because it sounds fun. As much as we’ve been killing ourselves over the past few months, it still is a lot of fun. The hard work is part of that.”
Riskin adds to this, saying, “You might as well bust your ass doing your own thing instead of doing it for someone else, for a salary, at the end of the day. It’s like doing nine-to-five every day, but with your own idea, instead of someone else’s.”
“It is our baby,” says Tan, gesturing to the space where a considerable crowd has formed at 5 PM on a Monday.
Photo by Joshua E. Cabalinan
In good spirits
When asked about Walrus’ future, the group meets the question with their typical nonchalance. De Castro shrugs when he speaks for all of them: “We don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows the future.”
De Castro, Walrus’ chief of Human Resources, recently moved in next door to keep watch. “We like to make sure we’re very hands-on,” Betita says. “We’ve been here almost everyday. At least two of us are here, and when we can no longer do that, that will be Braulio (de Castro)’s life.”
“We’re now working on handing over everything to our managers, because we still have other things going on,” says Riskin, gesturing towards Betita, who does social tourism work for Gawad Kalinga, and himself. “I’m currently working for a professional scuba diving license. I’m more responsible underwater than I am at the bar,” he jokes.
Now that Walrus is growing up, its rapid growth can be attributed not just to the team who built it but also to the patrons who make it what it is. Owe it to the exposure; Walrus may the trendiest thing on Katipunan since Cantina closed down and with good enough reason. While the drinks are great and the food is decent, it may be the Walrus spirit that everyone likes so much.
“We wanted it to be a celebration of life,” says Betita, explaining the personality that Walrus has created for itself. “Everything we love—music, the beach, travel—it’s all in the bar.”
“Because you see in our pictures,” she says, of the photos from that fateful surfing trip to Baler that hang on Walrus’ walls, “Everything happening, and it just makes you feel good.”
