For someone who had never competed in bartending competitions, Jacob Martin is a natural. “Winning World Class Canada was a massive surprise, and winning World Class Global was a truly significant surprise,” admits the mixologist, whose voice is smiling through the phone.
The accolades turned out to be a watershed moment for the young bartender. Despite his gumption, Martin confessed that he was caught off guard during a presumed mentorship session while judging at the Diageo World Class Global Finals in Shanghai.
“I [was not paired with] a young upstart bartender; I got director of operations for Liberty Entertainment Group, James Peden, who was there to ask me extremely precise questions about cocktails.”
Jacob Martin is the bar director at Liberty Entertainment Group
Having passed the impromptu interview, Martin was hired on his return to Toronto as bar director at Liberty Entertainment Group. The cocktail ingenue had previous experience at top Toronto cocktail bars, including Bar Pompette and Bar Banane — but now, tasked with properties ranging from the now Michelin-starred spots DaNico and Don Alfonso 1890 to King West clubs like Paris Texas, along with the Rogers Stadium, this was a totally different animal. “Making 12,000 cocktails for a Coldplay concert is something that still feels a little bit surreal to me,” Martin laughs.
Now, Martin treads the line, making cocktails — like the perfect martini — that work seamlessly with the many personalities of the hospitality group. “You never want a cocktail program to feel out of step with the food.” Sometimes that means a concept-heavy cocktail program, other times it’s about making a cosmopolitan for a steakhouse that doesn’t require a dictionary or a paragraph of tasting notes.
At Don Alfonso 1890, Martin has built a menu around Italian hand gestures, a nod to his and chef Davide Ciavattella’s heritage. From an olive-oil-laced OK Colada sour with kumquat to a booze-forward sipper that signals “I’m finished,” the menu charts the way Italians have long found a way to say “I love you,” “I hate you,” and “I’m hungry,” without ever opening their mouths.
Martin says he’s not a storyteller at heart, but instead uses narrative and anecdotes as a means of survival when it comes to creating so many cocktails across Liberty’s portfolio. It’s why he’s often found poring over archival menus. “If you can invent an arbitrary rule system in food to follow when you create, your creations have a lot more integrity.”
Whether he’s creating a historically significant cocktail at Casa Loma or one that can be batched at a stadium, for Martin, the stories come first, and the recipes follow.
Ironically, the lore of Prohibition became the guiding force behind the cocktail menu at BlueBlood Steakhouse, the former site of Casa Loma Hotel, which opened the day Prohibition ended in Ontario. “The city panicked,” says Martin, explaining that public drunkenness was still illegal at the time. “So much so that they had the police sit in the garden outside Casa Loma every single night with their hands pressed up against the windows to see if someone would leave inebriated.” Today, that history informs BlueBlood’s cocktail program. “Every drink is a lunch or dinner menu item from 1927 to 1929, converted into a cocktail.”
Garden Police blends Calvados and fuji apples with cotton candy grapes — and a surprisingly historical ingredient. “Casa Loma, and the gardens attached, were the first facility to grow celery in Canada.” Martin jokes they may have gone too far with celery, putting it in everything on the menu, from soup to ice cream, but wanted to honour the moment in Canadian gastronomy. “Plus, I like to imagine the police officers in the garden surrounded by celery.”
For Yorkville music lounge Powder Room, Martin leaned into semi-retro cocktails with a playful, elevated edge. “We thought we should make cocktails that feel like they’re part of a literal powder room.” The Birthday Suit — a high-velocity vodka soda with strawberry — arrives in a ceramic bathtub, topped with clouds of foam created using a VOM Edible Cloud machine.
“It looks like a cumulonimbus cloud floating through the bar,” Martin says. Built with green coconut, white strawberry, milk and pandan — “this amazing grass with a green-vanilla character” — the drink is designed to evoke tub time with a surreal, whimsical edge. “It seems like you and all your friends want to jam a straw into the side of it and drink the bubble bath.”
