Even on a rainy Thursday night, The Dirty Laundry is packed. While Toronto’s cocktail bars often feel reserved for date night or girls’ outings, this West Queen West bar feels like a true hangout. It has the relaxed energy of a neighbourhood bar, but serves an artful cocktail menu inspired by the envelope-pushing ethos of three-Michelin-star restaurant The French Laundry. We’d expect nothing less from one of the city’s most masterful mixology minds.
After years away from the bar scene, Robin Goodfellow, the visionary who founded Bar Raval and Prettyugly, is back. When he launched The Dirty Laundry this summer with only a list of classics (done exceptionally well), we wondered what the mixology magician had up his sleeve. It turns out, it’s an escape for imbibers in the form of drinks ranked on a scale of weirdness. The menu is divided into Kurt Kocktails, inspired by Goodfellow’s childhood hero Kurt Cobain and Nirvana’s songs, and the transportive clear Signatures that use a blend of distillates to recreate sensory experiences in nature.
At 1/9 on the weirdness scale, The Grove is boozy and fruit-forward, evoking an orchard, while The Garden scores a 9/9, using soil, cacao and coffee to create petrichor — that earthy post-rain smell — in a glass.
Legendary bartender Robin Goodfellow is the owner of The Dirty Laundry
Aldo Pescatore-Tardioli
“If I was at Willy Wonka’s factory and I shoved my face into the dirt, what would the soil taste like? It probably actually tastes like vegetables and soil, but it would be cacao and coffee and fun auxiliary things,” says Goodfellow. Using a rotovaporator straight out of a science lab, Goodfellow makes a soil distillate using earth from his garden after a rainfall.
But the point isn’t to make customers drink dirt. “It’s more like this is a beautiful aromatic experience,” says Goodfellow.
For him, it’s about the creativity and artistry that goes into capturing a flavour we wouldn’t normally be able to taste and putting it in a cocktail. “It’s like being in a submarine and looking through the periscope, safely being able to ingest and enhance all this stuff,” says Goodfellow. “It’s like safety goggles for your mouth.”
The science isn’t all about getting weird, though — Goodfellow uses distillates and acid solutions keep costs down, with cocktails starting at $13. With its kitschy décor, shelves lined with Star Wars paraphernalia and a shrine to the shuttered Prettyugly bar, The Dirty Laundry is eccentric, but its vintage couches and massive spirits selection make it a comfortable hangout, too.
“You can’t just throw a bunch of drinks together and expect people to like them just because they’re creative or adventurous,” says Goodfellow. “You still want people to have comfort with an espresso martini, extra sweet, or a skinny margarita. That’s something we do without flinching. Shaken vodka, dirty martini? No problem. Because one day they’re going to ask about the soil.”
Ian Patterson
Heart- Shaped Box
One of the weirdest cocktails on the menu, the Heart-Shaped Box combines a torched-fish rum with white vermouth, citrusy sudachi and rice milk. “At first, we used sake, and it was clarified. It was a little bit too boozy, so I switched that to rice milk, and it gave it that really cool white, thick, opaque colouring,” says Goodfellow.
“The Heart-Shaped Box to me was a lesson in restraint. You can use these weird ingredients, these things that don’t really sound like they’re going to taste good together, but you can make them taste good,” says Goodfellow. “I love the smell of torched fish, and we use a lot of that stuff in the food, so I thought, let’s make this light, refreshing cocktail ... I did not think anyone was going to like that, and surprise, surprise, they do.”
Ian Patterson
Lithium
This cocktail is heavy on the prep, but is one of TDL’s best sellers. The clarified mixture of brandy, Montenegro, PX sherry, plum, smoky, pineapple and winter spice is smoky, fruity, floral and cozy all at once.
The cocktail is finished with a tobacco distillate spray that’s made by using Goodfellow’s prized rotovaporator to vacuum distill a real cigar. “I’ve been using Montecristo No. 4s all year so far, and it ain’t cheap, but it’s awesome. We actually found that it’s better to light the cigar before you distill it, which was pretty hilarious,” says Goodfellow.
“When you distill something, it doesn’t just taste literally like it does in the real world. Some chemicals and some flavourings are left out. It was funny because the cigar gets very floral, which makes sense: It’s dried tobacco leaf that’s steeped for a bit and then distilled again. So, it’s very floral and then has earthy, dry, leathery notes to make that milk punch pretty fun and smoky and rich.”
Ian Patterson
The Grove
"All the Signature cocktails are based around making a drink taste like a geographical space. The Grove is definitely our most friendly version of that. It's 1/9 on the weirdness scale, whereas the The Garden is 9/9. So The Grove is a good entryway into the Signatures because of the flavours, but it's still relatively boozy and a bit weird.
"All the signatures are clear, to highlight that we've used these cool techniques, and you should pay attention to what you're tasting. [We're] not just giving you another pink drink," says Goodfellow.
"The Grove is garnished with peach dust, just to make sure you get enough fruitiness. It's a clear acid solution with a bit of rum to fortify it. Then it's a blend of a bunch of distillates that I thought would make you feel like you're walking through an orchard. We combine them like a perfume."
