booze | Fat Girl Food Squad

FGFS is pleased to welcome Janine Isabelle to our writing team. She plans on bringing you 100% more boozy cocktail content with her column A Toast! Janine is a Toronto-based designer and web developer with a penchant for kitting, the ukulele and the finer things. Keep checking back here for more from Janine and a lso, keep visiting Belle, Janine’s design & lifestyle blog cataloguing her work and inspiration.

Let me start off by saying that I am super stoked to kick off our new booze-themed column with a post about Toronto’s Bourbon Week festival. I’ve been a bourbon-drinker for a number of years, and I am hugely excited that the world is finally catching on to the awesomeness of Kentucky’s finest export.

I come from a very European family, so once I hit 12 or 13, having a small glass of wine on special occasions was pretty standard. I feel really grateful to have been brought up this way because it took the taboo away from alcohol consumption — getting hammered with your friends at 16 kind of loses its appeal when your grandmother lets you drink aperitifs before family dinners. Still, my taste in hard liquor has definitely matured over the years. I started out drinking mostly vodka, like most teenagers I think, then rum (Malibu & root beer, anyone?), and eventually gin. Then came one fateful day in my early twenties when I went up to the bar at a show in Vancouver to order my usual gin & ginger(ale). The bartender, bless her heart, said, “You should really try that with bourbon instead of gin”. I took her advice, and I’ve never looked back.

I moved to Toronto from the West Coast just over a year ago, and have been overjoyed at how this city has embraced the growing bourbon trend. Establishments like The County General, The Comrade, and Monarch Tavern all boast extensive bourbon offerings and fantastic cocktails. Cass Enright, founder of The Bar Towel and the Golden Tap Awards, decided to take things one step further and put together Toronto’s inaugural Bourbon Week, which ran from September 27th to October 3rd. With a myriad of bourbon-themed events like “Fingers & Bones” at the Indie Alehouse, “The Hillbilly Whisperer” at the Amsterdam Brewhouse, and “The Bourbon Derby” at 3030 Dundas West, the festival is a bourbon-lover’s dream. Yuli and I were particularly intrigued by “Classic from the Old School”, so we headed over to Monarch Tavern this past Monday to check it out.

The event was guest bartended by Joe Howell of the Spoke Club and featured five classic cocktails made with a range of the 35 bourbons Monarch regularly has on the shelf, including Ancient Age, Buffalo Trace, and Woodford Reserve (who also had a special lounge set up for tastings). The menu consisted of a classic Manhattan, Old Fashioned, Mint Julep, and Bourbon Sour, plus a Chocolate Vanilla Old Fashioned. Walking in, the place immediately had a speakeasy vibe, with the lounge setting, the bartenders in black & white, and a pianist in the corner playing old jazz standards.

For our first round, I tried the Chocolate Vanilla Old Fashioned. I was pleasantly surprised that the chocolate and vanilla flavours were both apparent without being overpoweringly sweet. I have to say though, it paled in comparison to my next choice – the Bourbon Sour. Now, this is my drink; it’s what I order when I’m channeling Don Draper (even though he drinks Old Fashioneds), so my expectations were pretty high. I was not disappointed. It was, quite possibly, the best Bourbon Sour I’ve ever had.