The Black Hoof Cocktail Bar

I pity the fool who comes into Jen Agg’s Cocktail Bar and asks for a vodka martini.

“We’re not going to sell vodka,” she says. “At all. No vodka. Can’t have it.”

One might conclude she is opening a cocktail bar for the express purpose of not serving vodka.

The actual reason is expediency. In February, she and her partner, Grant van Gameren, closed down the popular Hoof Café (923 Dundas West), with plans for an early summer re-opening as BHCO, a tasting-menu only restaurant. They didn’t make that target date. And the new plan is to open BHCO next spring. In the meantime, the Café spot will open as Cocktail Bar, which will eventually migrate across the street, to the space next to the Black Hoof. They plan on leaving up the sign from Ferreira’s portrait studio. So visually, it’ll be Ferreira’s Cocktail Bar.

The current incarnation of Cocktail Bar is set to open this Thursday, August 4^th. For now, it’ll run Thursdays to Mondays, 5:30 to last call. There will be cheese plates for snacking.

It will also host a series of pop-up dinners, featuring restaurant friends that Agg and van Gameren have made on their travels. The first is scheduled for late September, a three-day engagement by the crew from DNA, in Montreal (where I’m eating at in early September, ditching this stink-town for the first, and most annoying, weekend of TIFF).

As I don’t get paid for writing Porkisity, you ain’t getting no fancy lede or kicker. And you certainly aren’t getting transitions in between graphs. This is a blog. So below are some scenes from my dialogue with Agg, about the Cocktail Bar, chefs as bartenders, credit cards and her favourite subject, vodka, plus a few recipes.

Now I’m headed back to my current favourite bar, Snootington Manor, where they let you in wearing boxer shorts and a tank top, the bourbon is poured with a heavy hand and the TV never plays sports.

COCKTAIL BAR

AGG

We closed the café, with the intention of opening BH & Co in the spring. You may have noticed that didn’t happen, for various reasons. At the end of the day we decided together to open in spring of 2012, which left us with this dilemma of a beautiful space and nothing for it, while we wait on our liquor license for our actual cocktail bar, which is going beside the Hoof.

We’re still waiting on this building permit that we should have had a month ago. So we have a liquor license here, at the former café. And we decided, why not use the space, temporarily, for the next six to eight months while we build that place?

MINTZ

You’ve said that Toronto doesn’t have a strong cocktail bar scene. What city does?

AGG
New York city is the closest to us that has a great cocktail scene.

MINTZ
What makes it great?

AGG
Plenty of options and lots of people that care. I think there’s also an aspect of community, a bartenders’ community. They move around to each other’s bars.

I spent a few lovely evenings having dinner and chatting with Sasha Petraske, of Milk & Honey and Little Branch fame. He’s an interesting character. He’s got a huge heart. And the level he cares about the people who work for him was obvious to me and it was not bullshit.

Milk & Honey is just one of the most adorable little places you’ll ever go. It’s lovely. It’s like walking into a different world. And I want to create that environment here. But with my own voice. I love going to places where there are vests and monocles and pocket chains. But it’s not me. I want to play jazz here. But I also want to play indie rock here.

And I want to do it in a way that’s not such a big deal. It’s just a fucking drink. I don’t want it to be so precious that the fun is taken out of the experience.

MINTZ

How do you do that?

AGG
It’s the tone that you set, as the owner, as the trainer of the staff. You do that by being savvy in hiring. You hire people who can, at the very least, represent you well, and at the most, when you get the Ians and the Catherines, the people who can excel at their jobs, those people are special, and they bring a personality to it. So they take what you’ve taught them and then they go the extra mile. And unfortunately, it’s a transient business. Not to suggest it’s hobos working. But …

I write down the name for my theme restaurant, “Ho-Beau”, staffed by handsome homeless.

So most of the time you get people who are passing through, who want some temporary work and who don’t love the restaurant business. We try to hire people who love the restaurant business and we mostly succeed.

BRONX

1 oz. freshly squeezed orange juice

2 oz. gin

½ oz Lillet

½ oz. sweet vermouth

BARCHEFS

AGG
We want to showcase chefs and cooks as bartenders. That’s going to be on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (in September when the bar goes to seven days a week). We’ve already got Colin Tooke and Guy Rawlings lined up. And we’ll hopefully get some interest from young cooks and chefs throughout the city. The deal is, they make up a drink, their drink for the night. And their goal is to sell more of those than the drink list.

It’s an opportunity for them to make some serious money.

Our cooks get tipped out. Some of our cooks pay all of their rent and their phone bills with their tip-outs, which makes me really proud.

Without those people the restaurant obviously does not succeed. I think that it’s really wrong that the kitchens at most restaurants don’t see a share of that. We try to do a little bit to see that our cooks are taken care of that way. And we explain it to every server we hire. This is our tip-out. It’s higher than normal. But you’re going to feel good when you leave here. Because you’re going to have enough money in your pocket and you know that you’re not in a different class than the cooks.

VIEUX CARRÉ

1 oz. cognac

1 oz. rye

1 oz sweet vermouth

2 dashes Peychaud’s

2 dashes Angostura

¼ oz. Bénédictine

van Gameren came in, snacking on this semi-sweet green strawberry ice cream.

CREDIT CARDS

AGG

We’re also going to be doing these pop-up dinners with some chef friends that we’ve made over the last few years. We’re going to sell virtual tickets. You come and you’ve already paid for your meal. We’re going to take credit cards.

MINTZ
How do you feel about taking credit cards?

AGG
Shitty. I think credit’s horrible. But for an expensive meal, you can’t expect people to pay cash or debit.

MINTZ
What’s wrong with credit cards?

AGG
I think credit cards are inherently evil, as evidenced by the financial crisis in America. It’s obvious that people tend to, when they’re given an inch or mile of credit, they take the mile. And they get themselves in serious problems. I have one because you can’t book an airplane ticket or rent a car without one.

It’s also incredibly expensive to take credit cards. Our restaurant is a very low-profit operation in terms of how many people we have making and serving the food. We have a huge overhead cost of staff. Our prices are either in line or less than most restaurants that are casual fine dining in the city.

If we took credit cards we’d have to raise our prices because they are astronomically expensive. Once you start taking credit cards, you rack up thousands and thousands in fees every month. It adds up. It’s a few dollars for every bill.

And it’s a hard conversation to have. Because people don’t like talking about those kinds of things in the restaurant business. And most people just take credit cards and suck it up. But we don’t have to. We’re in a position where our prices are low enough where most people can afford to pay cash or debit. And it hasn’t been a problem. We’ve had a couple incidents over the almost three years we’ve been open of people getting overly upset about it. But frankly, people who are going to be abusive to the staff are not the kind of people I want coming into my restaurant.

SAZERAC

2 ½ oz. rye

a brush of absinthe (she likes to brush the glasses instead of swirl, so she can coat the lip)

splash of water

simple syrup

dash of Peychaud’s

VODKA

Stenciled on one wall is an excerpt from a piece that Agg wrote, titled, “Vodka is Stupid”. Even though I edited the essay, and so I’ve read it like six times, I ask her what it means.

AGG

It was Grant’s idea, and it was a great idea, to take the excerpt from the piece. Maybe he was joking, but I ran with it. The piece was meant to get across my feelings about vodka, which is that it’s a boring spirit that isn’t really great for cocktails. Its only real purpose is that it’s alcohol. There are all sorts of people who have made suggestions, some politely, and some, very pointedly, that it’s a cultural thing that I don’t understand. I happen to believe that just because something is cultural doesn’t make it good. Slavery was a cultural thing.

We’re not going to sell vodka. At all. No vodka. Can’t have it.

MINTZ

You don’t anticipate a problem here?

AGG

I don’t see it as a problem.

MINTZ

I think you do.

AGG

I really don’t. If somebody really wants vodka, we’re going to make them a lady saffron, which is saffron-infused gin, lemon juice and simple syrup. It’s along the lines of a cosmopolitan, in terms of flavour profile, even though it’s totally different, with gin. And by the way a cosmopolitan is not a terrible drink if it’s made properly.

MINTZ

If I were a vodka drinker, I would feel like you just told me, ‘oh, we can make you vegan beef tacos.’

AGG
No. It’s more like, if you were a vegan, and we told you we can make you pork tacos.

We’re not doing it to be gimmicky. It’s more about putting my money where my mouth is. If I’m going to say I don’t like vodka, why am I going to serve vodka? Grant’s not going to serve food he doesn’t like.

In addition to my current love, the giant ice cube, this drink is mad Negronish.

NEGRONI

1 ½ oz. gin

1 oz. sweet vermouth

¾ oz. Campari

splash of Aperol