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Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room?
At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne.
Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S. Thompson, Duke Ellington. Margaret Atwood used it as a setting for a scene in one of her novels, and raconteur Farley Mowat dropped in occasionally. It’s been a favorite afterparty spot for movie stars attending the Toronto International Film Festival.
The cocktails are too expensive to be habit-forming for a mere mortal. But the hefty purse of gold you slide across the bar at the end of the evening doesn’t just cover a couple of Wordsmiths (dark rum, calvados, sweet vermouth, herbal liqueur, bitters) or a half-dozen oysters washed down with an Age of Mass Culture (blanco tequila, fino sherry, amontillado sherry, elderflower and yuzu). It buys you a time-travel ticket to a place that probably doesn’t exist anymore — the old-world hotel bar where behind a smooth and untroubled surface of luxury a hundred things might be going on at once: the rich and famous are off-duty, casually rubbing elbows with the anonymous; international spies might or might not be casually making deals over in the shadowy corner; editors, anxious to keep the star author on the books, have brought him in to discuss his next project over steak tartare and a three-figure bottle of wine; politicians are talking shop; modern-day Maecenases are entertaining the artiste du jour together with a few friendsand ordinary hotel guests are having a quick nightcap before retiring for the evening.
How to sum up its charm? It’s like dropping into the opening scene of an Agatha Christie story: anything could happen. And while you’re waiting, the bartender can mix you an excellent cocktail.
This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition.
