Everything Is a Remix: Oto’s New Menu Cures the Loneliness Epidemic

There is a strange anxiety around influence these days. Every resemblance is treated like theft. Every reference becomes evidence. Every familiar note is interrogated for originality, as though culture advances only through immaculate conception. Just look at how we reacted to "Selos" and "Trouble Is a Friend" this decade, when in fact Andrew E. openly expresses how "Find an Ugly Woman" and "If You Wanna Be Happy" directly influenced "Humanap ka ng Panget."

Cocktails have never worked that way.

The new menu at Oto understands this. Arriving after years of patrons falling in love with its previous drinks, the menu does not attempt the impossible of absolute novelty. The Oto team embraces the fact that cocktails have always evolved through resemblance, mutation, and reinterpretation. A drink speaks to another drink. A bartender answers another bartender across continents and decades. Inspiration becomes lineage.

After all, a Negroni does not erase the Sbagliato (or is it the other way around?). A Boulevardier is not an Old Pal, even if both emerge from the same conversational grammar of bitter aperitif, whiskey, and vermouth. Their coexistence is precisely the point. The original remaining intact is what allows variation to become meaningful instead of dishonest.

Let’s take, for example, the menu’s playful articulation of this idea through a trilogy of Amaretto Sour descendants: Tom Tom Club, Fantasy, and Big Energy.

The names alone reveal the joke.

Tom Tom Club’s "Genius of Love" is one of the most sampled songs in popular music history. Mariah Carey’s "Fantasy" famously interpolates it. Decades later, Latto’s "Big Energy" would sample "Fantasy," creating a chain of influence layered across generations. None of the songs invalidates the others. They accumulate emotional associations through repetition and reinterpretation. A groove survives because it continues to become useful to people living different lives.

The drinks operate similarly.

One version shifts the base spirit from amaretto toward whiskey or bourbon. Another swaps hazelnut for pistachio or almond. Lemon becomes sour pear. Egg white becomes yolk foam. The structure remains recognizable enough for memory to activate, altered enough for surprise to emerge.

We don’t taste replication; we get to join a conversation.

And perhaps that is why the menu feels emotionally resonant beyond technical cleverness. In a culture obsessed with generational conflict, we are constantly encouraged to imagine boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z as mutually unintelligible species occupying separate moral universes. Influence would tell a different story where samples, riffs, remixes, and cocktail variations reveal continuity where discourse insists on fracture.

One generation hands another a phrase, a melody, a structure, a similar outrage under different contexts.

The result is not sameness. It is an accumulated difference.

We are reminded of a line from the ending theme of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong crime thriller later adapted into The Departed. Roughly translated, the lyric says: “We are all alone, but we are alone together.”

Maybe that is what influence really offers. We recognize that originality is not achieved by severing ourselves from others. We allow what came before, and what coexists with us, to pass through us, and we emerge, unique humans within an ecosystem.

OTO is at Villa Caridad 1, 5883 Enriquez, Poblacion, Makati City. Try out the new menu or listen to OTO: Everything is a Remix on Spotify.

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