The new dining place called 12/10 might just be the hardest table to get of late, though much of that difficulty comes from its own quirks. Aside from being in a slightly obscure part of Makati, it’s open only in the evenings, but not on Sundays; and, most frustrating of all, it doesn’t accept reservations.

This should have been my first clue, that I’m not part of 12/10’s target market; it’s for people who don’t make reservations.

If I’m arranging a dinner for five friends, I’d like to know that there’ll be a table waiting for us. But if reliability is all that we want in a restaurant, we might as well go to a hotel outlet or a business club, where the service is as efficient and precise—and the food unimaginative.

But one could never accuse 12/10 of serving bland cuisine. It just suffers from the terrible curse of being known as Bruce Ricketts on a budget, and though I can see how the comparison came about, it’s unfair both to him and to chef Gab Bustos, one-half (the bull, presumably) of the team behind The Girl + The Bull restaurant on Aguirre Street in BF Homes, Parañaque. (Aguirre seems to have become a kind of testing-ground for young chefs before they move on to bigger stakes.)

Both Bruce Ricketts’ Mecha Uma and 12/10 serve small plates of complex, Japanese-inspired flavors, though the former is about five times as expensive.

But at this point the similarities end. 12/10 is not really a restaurant; it’s an izakaya, or drinking spot, with little bites; and though you can put the small courses end to end to make up a kind of degustation, it’s not really a place to sit down for a long, serious, drawn-out meal.

I’ve previously had similar gripes about places like Rambla, where you can blow through the whole menu and still need a sandwich afterwards. But in hindsight, I had simply missed the point altogether; and the people who continue to patronize Rambla are simply the older versions of the young, stylish and good-looking crowd at 12/10, where the point is to chat over drinks; and when the tummy doth protest too much, quell it with a bite of something delicious.

But I have shifted my paradigm to understand that I wasn’t here to have a belly-busting meal that would have me rolling out the door and reaching for soda water and statins; I was secure in the knowledge that I had leftover lamb stew and rice waiting for me at home. It was much easier, and more fair to the intentions of the proprietors, to enjoy 12/10 for what it was.

Exotic mixed drinks

Quite simply, if you don’t drink—and by this I don’t mean little sips of red wine but complicated and exotic mixed drinks like artisanal sake, hot and cold, and very interesting single malts from Japan—then you’re missing out on most of the fun.

Envy the youth of today—in my 20s we just had Gold Eagle and Beer na Beer.

12/10 is artsy and well-designed in a Kinfolk magazine sort of way, with lots of white wall space, against which you can take pictures of people deliberately looking away from the camera. There’s art on the walls, brown apothecary bottles for water jugs and a suitably perplexing menu.

It’s arranged in sections of light, heavy and so on until the heaviest appetizers; and there’s a large onigiri: toro and foie gras on sushi rice in a seaweed wrap.

The servers, who are very helpful and informed, recommend getting a few from each section; but for couples, I myself would suggest to simply get everything on the menu, since each order comes as two pieces.

For four people, simply get everything twice over and so on; the place accepts half orders if your table is an odd number.

Proteins

The proteins are largely tuna, salmon and chicken; and they do tend to manifest themselves in the menu more than once. The beef dish, which is also the best thing on the menu, is a Wagyu burger between a steamed Chinese-style bun, juicy and crisp as a croquette between the cushion-soft halves.

The prices, at least for the food, are surprisingly reasonable; the drinks are priced moderately for what they are. It’s been a long time since I touched alcohol, but the drinks list offered a good many challenges to my sobriety.

Arm yourself with ample cash (credit cards not honored), and pace the food with lots of drinks; otherwise, it’s like watching a movie with the sound off.

I would recommend experimenting and expanding the menu so that there’s more to choose from, and entreat the proprietors to offer some interesting nonalcoholic options.

What else? Take reservations. Get a card machine. Get a landline. Get off my lawn! In the end, though, my frustration with 12/10’s idiosyncrasies is more than outweighed by admiring it for having a unique vision and sticking to it.

Bustos’ cooking is good and will get better over time, as long as he pushes himself to play with more ingredients and techniques, and doesn’t stagnate. I look forward to following this new talent, and to seeing where and how far he can go.

12/10 is at 7635 Guijo Street, San Antonio Village; tel. 0915-6632823.