The charm of Toronto’s Park Hyatt Writer’s Room
Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room? At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne. Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S.
