Nick Kennedy

Though he is the meticulous craftsman behind some of Toronto’s top-ranked bar experiences, Nick Kennedy’s first foray into bar ownership was, arguably, a misstep. He opened Toronto’s much-lauded Civil Liberties in 2015 with no menu — a bold play then heralded as revolutionary. But it was really just happenstance.

“A concept born out of poverty and lack of planning,” Kennedy says of the venture. “We ran out of time and money, and we just had to open the doors.” He intended to introduce a menu a week or two later, but by then, Civil Liberties was being praised for its wild-card à la minute bespoke cocktail concept. So why mess with a good thing? The bar has ranked in the top 10 on C100B’s Best Bars list five times, twice at No. 1. This year, it is No. 3.

Kennedy’s subsequent moves — most involving business partner David Huynh — have been equally innovative but conceptually divergent, encompassing bars, pop-ups and bottled cocktails, along with quick-serve restaurant Vit Béo. His Civil Pours cocktails hit the shelves at Ontario’s LCBO stores this summer, and he holds patents for the vacuum-distillation process that produces them. He runs a Christmas-themed pop-up each season, this year adding a second location. He is also a partner in the Australian-themed bar Electric Bill.

Could this mad cocktail scientist possibly take on more wacky projects? Well, he opened Civil Works (No. 32) last summer based on ready-to-pour pre-batched cocktails — a full about-face from the Liberties concept. Its cheeky 14-page menu is titled “A Manual for Laying Pipe.” For extra giggles, he created a method to mimic celebrated water sources around the world — say, Bardstown, Kentucky, and the Spey River in Scotland — through a process of mineralization. These are matched with regional spirits to recreate, as closely as possible, the experience of drinking the real thing in the real place. It’s the kind of deep-nerd dive that Kennedy loves, whether anyone else thinks it’s cool or not. “There’s not a lot of money in restaurants and bars,” he says, “but there’s a lot of freedom. And I learned more about water in six months than anyone I know.” As the menu at Civil is the first that Kennedy has ever produced — with bar manager Elise Hanson and head bartender Jorge Rodriguez contributing — he was amused that it received the best cocktail menu award for 2025 from the World’s 50 Best Bars.

Up next, Kennedy turns his wild imagination to a project called Civil Parks, a sprawling summer patio extension of Civil Works that pays homage to the historic St. Andrew’s Playground, the city’s first downtown playground, which opened in 1908. Because every great concept needs either a strong narrative or a complicated reason for being, if you’re Nick Kennedy. And for that, we are thrilled to name him our 2025 innovator of the year.

—DICK SNYDER