Name/alias: Kevin Jollimore, alias “K-Bone”. Or “Hey you”, “Bud”, or “Chief” if you are only planning to have the one drink.
Current bar: Cadillac Lounge
How long in the business: I served my first beer in 1977, at a basketball game at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. They start young down east, you know.
First drink/drunk: First drink had to be a small glass of beer after mowing the lawn as a kid. My old man would laugh at the funny faces I would make drinking it. I was probably around age 10. First drunk was with a bunch of fellow 10th graders. We bought a case of quarts (remember those?) for the high school dance. We weren’t able to finish them all off, so we buried them in a friend’s backyard, to be retrieved for the NEXT high school dance.
What influences me: I’m pretty old school, I like the standards. Vodka soda, gin and tonic, rye and coke, that kind of thing. Brought a drink recipe back from Mexico once, it’s called ‘The Vampiro’….Tequila and Tomato juice. Tasty. And by the way, it’s rum and coke, not rum and pepsi, rum and cola or any other synonym for coke. There’s even a song about it… “drinkin’ rum and coca cola…..” I still contest that a martini is gin and vermouth, and ONLY gin and vermouth, but I will make whatever the customer wants. I’ve seen many a trend come and go, ‘Dry’ beer and micro brews in the eighties, cold filtered ‘draft’ beer in the bottle and Ice beer in the nineties, lime flavoured beers and wheat beers these days. It’s fun to experiment, but I find that people come back to the old stand-bys.
Best barfly: Two guys got extra inebriated at a place I used to work; we tried to do the responsible thing and put each of them in a cab, but no cabbie would take these guys. They were too hammered. So, we hid one guy in the bushes while we flagged a cab for the other, and then grabbed the guy from the bushes and jammed him in the cab, too. We gave the cabby fare money and addresses, by the way.
Cinematic bartender: I love Moe the bartender on The Simpsons. Such humanity!
Rules: I’ll give the customer whatever they desire, but when someone comes up to the bar and just orders ‘a beer’, I grab a bottle of Canadian and place it before them.
Celebrity experiences: I once worked at this dive at Yonge and Eglinton, nothing but a bunch of pensioners hung out there, drinking and farting. Actually, they should have called it that: Drinking and Farting. Anyway, it was around 1990, they were filming a movie across the street, and during their lunch break, David Johansen, who was starring in the flick, came in. Of course, being a rock and roller myself, I knew him as the singer of The New York Dolls, and so I chatted with him at length. He wanted to watch the Yankee baseball game, which I kindly dialed in for him. All the pensioners were wondering why I was paying this guy so much attention. When he was leaving, he threw me his credit card and told me to buy everyone in the joint a drink and tell them it was “from Buster Poindexter”.
Best late-night or morning-after places: Sizzling Grill at Queen and Landsdowne is opened REALLY late. Back in the eighties I used to hang at a speak called ‘Ennui’. The dude who ran it had a sliding window slot that he would look out at you from, and you even had a membership card. All it said was one word: ‘ENNUI’. No address, nothing. Cool. For Breakfast, Jim’s Western Sandwiches at Queen and Logan is a real slice of life. Been running for years. They filmed a scene from ‘Cocktail’ there.
Best /worst tip: Best tip ever was after serving three people three bottles of Dom Perignon. The bill came to $670. Dude left me a $1000 bill, and said, “Thanks, keep the change”. I had to get the manager to verify that it was a real bill, which it was. Worst tip is getting nothing, or worse, having a walk out, which is basically theft. I never get too twisted out of shape about cheapskates, because plenty of regulars tip me generously. It all balances out.
Favourite cocktail/beer/wine right now: I’ve been drinking Wild Turkey lately. I’m a singer, and they say it’s good for the vocal chords.
Watch for: I always choose to work the ‘slow’ nights, I get to chat with customers that way. The Cadillac Lounge has a great vibe, and the staff is amazing. Good music, too. When I’m not working, I sing in my band, The Sin City Boys. I also act, and just finished five years with a touring musical that did lots of shows. I recently starting producing bands, it’s fun. I like to have LOTS of irons in the fire.
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Cadillac Lounge, 1296 Queen Street West, Toronto
Kerry and Ivy Knight write the XX Files column for Toronto Standard. Follow them on Twitter at @keppsterr and @IvyKnight.
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