Who Harry is
Harry the Horse is a sixty-something Western bloke who came to the Philippines for a fortnight in the late nineties, went home, came back, and then stopped going home. In 1999 he started emailing a few mates an account of what was happening on Fields Avenue — which bars had opened, which had changed hands, what a beer cost, which hotel had hot water that week — and signed it off “welcome to my stable”. The few mates became a few thousand subscribers, and the Mail Bag column at the bottom, where readers wrote in with questions, became the bit everyone actually read.
The newsletter ran, on and off, until about 2011. Then life happened, the web moved on, forums took over, and harrythehorse.com sat there quietly collecting links from every Angeles City discussion of the last two decades. It’s back because the questions never stopped: the same blokes still write in wanting to know whether it’s safe, what a ladies’ drink costs, whether they’re too old, and which hotel won’t charge them a joiner fee.
What this site is
A comprehensive, honest guide to Angeles City nightlife — 10 area guides, 52 bars and clubs, 18 hotels, 12 places to eat, 23 long-form guides and practical pages, a full price list, a glossary, and the Mail Bag running again. It’s written for adults: frank about what the town is, never lurid about it, and no more coy than a conversation at the end of a bar.
There are things you won’t find here. No prices for anything that isn’t a drink, a room, a meal or a ride. No explicit detail. Nothing about anyone under eighteen, in any framing, ever. No naming and shaming of individual bar staff. If that’s what you came for, there are other websites and you have my blessing to go and read them.
How we verify things
Every factual page on this site carries a date and a method. There are four of them:
- Onsite — Harry, or someone he trusts, has been in the place recently and looked at it.
- Reader — a reader reported it and it matched what we already believed.
- Phone — we rang and asked, usually about hours or a joiner policy.
- Web — desk research: the venue’s own pages, recent reviews, news reports, official sources. This is the weakest of the four and it’s labelled as such.
Where we can’t stand something up, the page says so: venues we haven’t confirmed carry an “unverified” badge and hedged wording rather than being quietly deleted, because a page that says “we’re not sure this is still open” is more use to you than no page at all. Prices are ranges, dated to the month, and reviewed quarterly. If you find something wrong — and you will — write to harry@harrythehorse.com and it gets fixed, usually the same week.
Who pays for it
This site is owned and operated by the company behind filipina.app, a Filipina dating app, and it links to that app throughout — in the header, in the sidebar, between sections, at the foot of the page. Those links are labelled “Harry’s partner · filipina.app” wherever they appear. That’s the whole business model: no display advertising, no affiliate hotel links, no sponsored bar reviews, no pay-to-rank.
It matters because it keeps the editorial clean. A bar cannot buy its way up the list, and a hotel that Harry wouldn’t stay in doesn’t get a kind word because there’s a commission in it. The full details are on the disclosure page.
The photographs
A run of them are Harry’s own — Walking Street after rain, the inside of a go-go room, the discos at four in the morning, the Clark fence from above, a flooded street in July. They were taken on whatever phone was in his pocket between 2013 and 2022, they carry no attribution requirement because they’re ours, and they’re gathered on one page in Angeles City in photographs. The published files carry no location data; the GPS stayed on the originals.
The rest of the photography is Creative Commons material from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image and listed in full on the credits page with the photographer, the licence and a link to the original. The profile photographs in the filipina.app units are that app’s own, used with permission. We don’t hot-link other people’s images, and we don’t use photographs of identifiable people in a way that suggests anything about them.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions for the Mail Bag, or a note to say a bar has closed: harry@harrythehorse.com, or the contact page. Harry reads everything and answers most of it eventually. Twenty-seven years and counting.
