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Toby Maloney was behind the bar at such New York City craft cocktail OGs as Pegu Club and Milk & Honey before co-founding Chicago’s equally pioneering The Violet Hour in 2007. The two-time James Beard Award winner—once for The Violet Hour and once for his 2022 book The Bartender’s Manifesto—also helped launch the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s bar (yes, the one from Lost in Translation), spent the better part of a year doing “cocktail omakase” at Philadelphia’s famously fastidious Hop Sing Laundromat, and recently revamped the bar menu at the Midtown Manhattan Four Seasons.
And now?
You’ll find him in Vancouver.
Maloney, along with Southern California chefs Monique King and Paul Rosenbluh, has refurbished The Elbow Room, a Broadway dive bar that has been around since 1968, along with the adjacent diner Paul’s Cafe (named for original owner Paul Bell). Maloney also lives in uptown Vancouver.
“Everybody has a story about The Elbow Room,” he says. “Like, ‘This was the first place I had a drink when I was 21. Or before I was 21.’ Or, ‘This is where I used to come and get my granddad on Friday nights.’”
With its wood-paneled walls (plus some animal-print wallpaper outside the restroom), Naugahyde booths and an L-shaped, nine-seat bar, The Elbow Room has that sort of Edward Hopper/David Lynch vibe that you can’t create from scratch, even though such period-authentic touches as a black-light owl painting and a Cutty Sark sconce lamp that King acquired at thrift stores.
Maloney and King first met in the ’90s, working together at the Chicago restaurant Soul Kitchen, where Maloney was an oyster shucker. Rosenbluh would also work there, while one of its owners, Terry Alexander, would go on to back Maloney at The Violet Hour. By then King was in Los Angeles, where she and Rosenbluh eventually opened several places, including two old-school diners with upgraded food. They discovered Paul’s and The Elbow Room via King’s brother, who lives in Camas, Wash. They had only just closed the deal when one of their Altadena restaurants, Fox’s, was lost to the Eaton Fire; five months later, The Violet Hour closed due to building (and landlord) issues.
Originally, Maloney was just going to consult, but he fell in love with “this amazing, beautiful magical space” as well as the challenge of developing a bar program to fit it.
“In this bar, it doesn’t make sense to have a program that is super mixology,” he says. “The idea was to find a way to deliver incredibly high-quality, great, interesting, complex cocktails, quickly…and with a certain sort of ’70s laissez faire. We just want it to be a cool bar that feels like it’s been around forever, and you just happen to get really good drinks.”
It’s a bar from the Seventies, but not a quote-unquote Seventies bar. No kitsch (though there is a turntable, and Bob Seger and Kenny Rogers records). No Harvey Wallbangers (though you can definitely order an off-menu amaretto sour, à la Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s recipe). The opening menu, on marker boards, is simple: five batched and mononymous “speciality” cocktails (the “GIN” comes with apple, cuke, lemon, genepy and ginger) for $14, three classics (daiquiri, paloma, Negroni; all $12), and three “highballz” (ranch water, scotch and soda, rye and ginger; $10). Beer, wine, cider and nonalcoholic drinks are also available. Plus, on the specials board, a promise of: “WEIRD coming soon!”
But until then, for something both ambitious and unique, there’s The Elbow Room’s version of a Freezer Door, which fuses both nostalgia and ice science into the coldest possible martinis, Gibsons and Manhattans you’ve ever had. Here’s Maloney’s breakdown of what goes into making the Elbow Room’s Freezer Door Manhattan:
The Skating Rink
Freezer Door cocktails are typically premade in a bottle, and stored exactly where the name suggests. But if the ABV of what you’re freezing is too low, you run the risk of slush. Maloney puts a twist on that by doing it on purpose, harking back to his memories of the “skating rink ice” texture of a dive bar’s shaken and then poorly strained martini.
The Vermouth “Granita”
The Freezer Door Manhattan starts with a base of Cinzano sweet vermouth, Cocchi Torino vermouth and Amaro Ramazzotti, plus angostura bitters, Bittercube orange bitters, and just a little bit of rye. It’s frozen at 8 degrees Fahrenheit, then kept in a reach-in freezer at the bar. Maloney got the idea while watching them make an ice cream float at Paul’s, thinking to himself, “Can I make vermouth ice cream?” without the cream.
“And then I started thinking about a granita, which is an Italian, icy dessert, more chunky than a sorbet,” he says. “Could I make something that is almost a savory, complex, boozy granita?”
Yes, he could.
The Swoop and Pour
When someone orders the drink, it’s scooped out with a melon-baller into a vintage martini glass (also thrifted, and a deliberate swing away from the coupes Maloney favored in his other bars).
Then the rye, 100-proof Rittenhouse, goes in. It’s $10 for a single, $14 for a double (and a two-drink limit per person if you get the latter). It’s finished with an orange peel—for Maloney, that hint of acid and citrus is a must in almost any cocktail—and, of course, a skewer of Luxardo cherries, which is also used to stir.
The Hoar Frost
The glass is slightly chilled, not fully frozen, because it doesn’t have to be. Once that high-proof rye mixes with the pre-frozen ingredients, the glass develops hoar frost. While the icy, boozy drink hits hard on the first sip, it eventually achieves both perfect temperature and balance from melting the granita.
“It’s built to drink super slow,” Maloney says. “The first few sips are arguably too cold. Like, you don’t get a lot of the complexity. You get this kind of Dairy Queen headache. But then the narrative arc of it is that you can drink it 15 minutes down the road, where most other martinis or Manhattans would be warming up. It’s still really cold, but getting a lot more of the complexity, and a lot more of the heart of what that cocktail is.”
TRY IT: The Elbow Room, 1800 Broadway, Vancouver, Wash., paulselbowroom.com/the-elbow-room. 4–10 pm Monday–Wednesday, 4–midnight Thursday, 4 pm–2 am Friday, 11–2 am Saturday, 11 am–10 pm Sunday.
