Over the last few years, James Grant has been collecting the world’s top bartenders like infinity stones. Ago Perrone rolled his Martini trolley in from London to serve The Connaught’s iconic Martinis for a two-night residency at Library Bar at the Fairmont Royal York. Tokyo’s Bar BenFiddich popped by to host a cocktail omakase last month.
To close out this year of guest shifts, Grant kept it Canadian and on November 3, brought in three of the country’s most forward-thinking cocktail minds for a one-night-only, cross-Canada cocktail bar.
The line-up: Brant Porter of Humboldt Bar (#34), a Victoria bar that explores the life of Alexander von Humboldt, a 19th-century naturalist, through cocktails. Porter won over the crowd with hyper-B.C. cocktails like Life in the Woods: a boreal blend of Bearface’s Bear-bon Canadian whisky, candy cap mushrooms, tart maple water, cypress, and grand fir
Alex Quentin-Brunel’s Bar Numéro (#17), out of Montreal, showed up and turned out with smart, contemporary drinks like Glow On, a force-carbonated highball that calls for Glendalough Double Barrel Irish Whiskey, cedar, Balsam fir, aquavit, and tonka bean.
Representing the prairies (Library Bar Director of Beverage James Grant’s old stomping ground), Ben Staley and Steven Jorgensen of Next of Kin (#46), a groovy, ‘70s-leaning basement bar in Edmonton. Even after one of the three batched bags of cocktails ruptured on their plane’s stowage hold, they rebounded strongly with showings like the Cherry 3: an herbal, stirred drink with cherry tomato gin, vermouth, amaro, and cascara
While Grant has brought in some of the world’s biggest cocktail names, the evening was steadfastly Canadian — showcasing the creativity bubbling up from coast to coast and the richness of Canadian cocktail culture.
—Kate Dingwall
Share: Facebook, X (Formerly Twitter)
