Toronto's most serious cocktail bar — Civil Liberties is where bar industry professionals go on their nights off. The menu of original cocktails is built around obscure spirits, unusual bitters, and unexpected flavour combinations. The room is moody and intimate. A reservation is strongly advised.
Neighbourhood: Yorkville · Address: 18A Bellair St, Toronto, ON · Hours: Tue–Sat 6pm–2am
Why Visit
Civil Liberties is the city’s go-to for boundary-pushing cocktails that make even experienced drinkers raise an eyebrow. Expert bartenders craft custom drinks, often using ingredients you’ve genuinely never heard of.
What Makes It Unique
There’s no printed menu — you just tell the bartenders your vibe, base spirit, and what you’re feeling, and they improvise something original. It’s the rare place where local bartenders themselves hang out, which tells you everything about the quality. You’ll almost always end up tasting a spirit or mixer you’ve never encountered.
Civil Liberties in Yorkville is where Toronto's bar industry professionals drink on their nights off — the kind of recommendation that communicates both the quality and the particular character of the operation. Founded by bartenders for bartenders, Civil Liberties operates on the premise that serious cocktail culture requires education, that spirits deserve the same depth of study as wine, and that the people best positioned to curate a drinking experience are those who have spent careers understanding the craft.
The spirits collection is the first signal: Civil Liberties maintains one of the most comprehensive and thoughtfully curated spirits programs in the city, with particular strength in whisky (Scotch, American, Japanese, and Canadian), rum (agricole, aged, historic expressions), and amaro — the Italian bitter liqueur category that has moved from obscure to enthusiast-favoured over the past decade. The collection prioritizes quality and interest over volume, which means finding bottles here that you won't encounter elsewhere in Toronto.
The cocktail menu reflects the spirits library — composed drinks that use these materials thoughtfully, building complexity through spirit layering, house-made modifiers, and careful attention to dilution and balance. The approach is classically informed but not archival: Civil Liberties makes contemporary cocktails with historical grounding rather than reproducing pre-Prohibition recipes without adaptation.
The Yorkville neighbourhood provides an interesting contrast to the bar's industry-insider character — the surrounding streets are some of Toronto's most expensive real estate, lined with luxury boutiques and high-end hotels that would seem more naturally paired with the Louix Louis aesthetic than with a spirits-nerd cocktail bar. Civil Liberties seems not to mind the neighbourhood incongruity. It draws its own crowd from across the city, and the walk up from Bloor-Yonge subway through the Hazelton Lanes area to the bar provides a pleasant orientation to one of Toronto's most architecturally interesting pockets.