Rabbit and I just got back from cocktails and snacks at Harbour 60 (Sunday early evening). Rabbit is cooking dinner so I’m doing the typing.

The bar is the cozy room to the left as you walk in. Feels like an English club; granite topped bar, stocked with all-you-can eat side bacon strips and cheese straws.

Rab and I slide up and ask for all the menus (dinner, wine, cocktail). Cocktails are $21 each and wine is $12-$30 per glass. Rab and I consider the lemon grass martini and the watermelon-ginger martini. I end up ordering the sazerac to see how they do it and Rab gets cabernet because she is trying to detox.

Over the next half hour, we are plied relentlessly with bar snacks. They had me at all-you-can-eat bacon, but as soon as the drinks arrived, so did a plate of olives and pickles on sticks. A few sips later, a plate of cheese, nuts, and fruit arrived. Towards the end of the drinks, a huge plate of olives, peppers, and marinated feta arrived as well. Rab and I were sorely tempted to stay for dinner, especially after watching the huge seafood and steak platters fly by around us. But we had already blown our wad at the Fifth on Friday (see previous review) so we had to exercise discipline and get out of there while it was still a 2-figure affair.

A note on the sazerac: the drink I got was some sort of citrus punch, not a sazerac. I usually send back cocktails when they are wrong (cf the so-called “mint julep” at ByMark) but I let it go because of the aforementioned bacon. But then the bartender sets down a second sazerac and asks if I like it better. I say yes, I can taste the pernod in the second better. She then fesses up that sazerac 1 is actually a rum and citrus concoction while sazerac 2 more closely resembles a sazerac with bourbon and pernod plus some extracurricular citrus. This same bartender also let Rabbit taste all the cabs before she had to select. So two thumbs up for such a user friendly bar.

The menu looked tasty but pricey, but is actually par for the course for a high-end steak house. Starters are $20-$40 and steaks all seemed to be about $52 each with a la carte sides at $12. Rabbit and I spent a lot of time figuring out what we would order if it were an expense account dinner. The wine list was impressive, but the markups were 5x-6x retail which seems to be twice the going rate. All in all, we decided that if we were going to spend $200-$300 of our own money, we would be happier going to someplace like Susur. Having said that, the drinks were lovely and we will add Harbour 60 to our regular cocktail rotation.

Posted on May 13th, 2007 by rabbit
Filed under: Toronto, Restaurant Reviews