Marilyn’s Wants to Curate the Crowd Before TikTok Does

An old friend of Zach Macklovitch's applied for membership at Marilyn's, the new private bar attaché below Old Montreal’s Italian seafood room, Mare. That friend got turned down, though not because they were broke, unstylish, or unknown, only that they wrote something to the effect of: I'm an OG, so I should be included.

"I didn't approve it," Macklovitch says, "because the other people that are putting applications in right now are writing, like, hey, this is what I do for work, this is why I feel this will be good, I'm really interested in a place where I can meet like-minded people. They bring the right energy to it."

Marilyn's soft-opened on June 28 and has been widening its offering since. Membership is invitation-only and free for now. "Our plan for the foreseeable future is to keep it that way," Macklovitch says. "Should we expand to more locations and offer more amenities that may change, but as we stand it is a free membership." Applicants are being screened on the merit of whether or not they're someone worth sitting beside. There's an objection to make here, and we'll get to that.

It all starts at a Miami dive bar

The arc begins at Miami’s oldest bar, Mac's Club Deuce, sometime around a past edition of Art Basel. Macklovitch was there with Nathan Gannage, Thomas Pilgrim, Matty Panetta, and Mathieu Keyser, doing the rounds of high-energy events and “the world's most expensive vodka sodas,” and they kept peeling off to the same dive.

"They let you smoke inside. We can't do that at our spots, obviously. But drinks aren't too expensive, they play great music, you never know who's going to walk in the door. It'll be a group of real deal neighbourhood South Beach alcoholics next to billionaires next to supermodels next to college kids, and it's just a good time," Macklovitch recalls.

He came home to two text chains running in parallel. One group chat wanted somewhere to get a cold beer before a holiday party. The other, with Victor-Alex Petrenko aka Coach Vic, was about why there was nowhere decent in Montreal to watch basketball. He merged the threads, decided it needed food, and called chef Danny Smiles. That became Double's on Parc.

It worked better than the spreadsheet projected. "If I were to show you our metrics when we were originally doing our financial projections, we never would have thought that we would have been seeing the kind of success (it has). We just didn't know how that math worked."

Having spent his twenties building reliably loud rooms on the Main—Suwu in April 2013, then Apt. 200 and École Privée—Macklovitch found himself thinking about people who had nowhere else to go, and how few places are built for actual talking, whether social or simply energetic.

"They say that there's a loneliness epidemic right now, and I think a lot of that has to do with the shared spaces we live in. Most people, when they're walking around retail stores for example, have headphones in. If you're at a coffee shop you're staring down at a laptop. If you're at a nightclub the music's too loud to talk. We have some of the best cocktail bars in the world in Montreal, and I love going to them, but they don't necessarily conform to mingling."

His test case is blunt: singledom, where if you clock someone across the room, there is no socially acceptable way to move your seat. By his count, most bars fail at this.

This is the part where TikTok ruins it

The other half of the story explains why Marilyn's has a door: Montreal is, in Macklovitch's telling, absurdly well served in terms of places to go. "We're too good per capita as a city. I'm blessed to go to New York a lot, LA, Miami, Europe. These cities are five times bigger than us at the smallest. And on a Saturday night in Montreal, I can give you 10 amazing bars and clubs to go to. My friends in LA, I'm like, where are we going? They're like, I don't know, everything's shit."

The flip side of a city with that much supply and a drinking age of 18 is a brutally short life cycle. A bar opens, it's good, it gets found, posted, and most likely flattened.

"Shortly after opening, the product becomes hyper-popular and frequented sometimes by more people than the bar or club is ready to manage. We even saw that at Double's, where at one point we were at risk of becoming a college bar. When you get popular on TikTok, the TikTok generation comes in, and then you start getting that stereotypical thing in Montreal where the person says, oh well, that place is young, or it's too wild for me there."

Marilyn's is his attempt to get in front of that curve rather than react to it eighteen months too late. Cap the room, vet the list, and the room stays mixed on purpose instead of homogenizing by accident. "I literally developed Marilyn's to be a non-homogeneous space," he says.