Zola RestoCafé
Patria de Baguio Bldg., Session Road
Baguio City
The Young and the Restless
By Kiki Tan

In 2004, when I held office along Emerald Avenue in Ortigas Center in Pasig City, the place went dead after, say, 6.30 P.M., when just about everyone had left their offices to head home.  Not a year after I moved back to Makati City, when I went to visit Emerald Avenue, it was no longer the place I remember – there were three or four convenience stores (7-11 and MiniStop), a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a Figaro, fastfood chains (KFC,  et cetera), and drinking venues (Café A-go-go, et cetera).  Much – if not all – of the credit rightfully goes to the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, which include call center, medical transcription, animation, back-office operations, et cetera.
Well, the trend is not limited to just Metro Manila now, as Baguio City has mimicked this very exact thing (in particular), as its main road, Session Road, becoming a hip, hip place, largely (if not exclusively) because of the growing BPO industry in the city north of Metro Manila.

It is in this scenario that Zola RestoCafé emerged, and is creating a name.

For one, with many of the BPOs based along Session Road, BPO workers, especially those in the night shift, would need a place to go to – for eating, drinking, or simply hanging out (this is how convenience stores earn big, big money).  In Baguio, Zola is one of only (let me count) five open 24/7, making it a good place for this.  Secondly, everything here is cheap – e.g. choco drink (a la Café Adriatico’s Tsokolate Eh and Ah) costs P55 (versus over P120 in Metro Manila), rice meals from P50, pastas from P60, et cetera.  And thirdly, if you want the yuppies of Baguio City, this is the place to go to (at least for now), from athletes to the sexy geeks to the fresh graduates to the supervisors to the…  You get the point.

This venue’s still evolving, nonetheless – and thank goodness for this one, with the current ongoing glitches including the slow service (normal: slow; when busy: really, really slow); the unclear delineation of sexual/gender identification of those going there (e.g. athletes tend to be heterosexual – though, in the Philippines, not that THAT means anything, just that you just have to pay to bed most of them); and its limitations because it is, at the end of the day, just a restocafé, no more – so forget the music, the dancing, the…  Here, just eat, drink (some), pick up or be picked up, and move on; then repeat next time.  That’s that.

Sometimes I am asked if I regret leaving Emerald Avenue before it turned out, well, not that bad, after all.  Well, not really – my place is right beside Makati City and the City of Manila (address is Makati City, though), so I have more than enough venues to go to, if/when that’s what I am after.   Still, I have to admit that, yes, it would have been fun experiencing the place and the life it was given.

Well, at least now Baguio City’s people won’t miss out on this kind of fun, thanks to Zola.