Library Bar

Tucked away off the busy lobby of the Fairmont Royal York, the sumptuously upholstered, deco-accented Library Bar is Toronto’s most storied cocktail den. Its literary theme — signalled by the portrait of George Locke, the city’s early-20th-century chief librarian, hanging over the mantelpiece — extends to the cocktail menu. This year, it is inspired almost entirely by Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. Mixology director James Grant (the 2021 World Class Bartender of the Year) created Little Seeds, a gin-whisky highball incorporating spruce-tip distillate, maple syrup and candied pine cone, to evoke the novel’s opening scenes set in the woods and lumber camps of northeastern Ontario. Grant attracts global colleagues for bar-raising guest shifts, as when Agostino Perrone from London’s The Connaught Bar jetted in to mix and pour Martinis tableside. This is a bar studiously striving for cocktail perfection, and coming just about as close as can be.