Andrew Whibley didn't get behind the bar by being the obvious choice.

When he started out as a busboy at 18, the cocktail bar—as a concept—barely existed in Montreal, and the path to bartending, he'll tell you plainly, tended to favour a certain look. So, he did the next best thing: he learned more than everyone else. He read books, studied classics, worked his way onto service bar, and eventually into the kind of rooms he wanted to be in.

By the time the opportunity for Cloakroom came along in 2015, Whibley had spent years absorbing what was happening in New York, what was missing in Montreal, and what bars could be if you stripped away theatrics and focused on what was in the glass. The concept, tucked inside a haberdashery in the Golden Square Mile with no menu and maybe 20 seats, was a provocation of sorts in a city that hadn't quite found that register yet. It worked: Cloakroom would go on to earn four consecutive appearances on the North America's 50 Best Bars list and top-three finishes on Canada's 100 Best every year from 2023 to 2025.

Since then, Whibley has expanded his footprint downtown with Bar Dominion, a cocktail bar and dining room built on the bones of the old Dominion Square Tavern, and Le French Line, the cocktail bar within Le 9e's Île de France restaurant, a 35-seat room modelled on the golden age of transatlantic ocean liners.

Each project is a different argument about what Montreal drinkers want, and taken together they amount to something like a running theory of the city's bar scene, tested and revised in real time.

We sat down with him to find out where that theory currently stands.

Cloakroom has been on the 50 Best Bars list four years running. How much does that kind of recognition actually matter to you?

Andrew Whibley didn't get behind the bar by being the obvious choice.

When he started out as a busboy at 18, the cocktail bar—as a concept—barely existed in Montreal, and the path to bartending, he'll tell you plainly, tended to favour a certain look. So, he did the next best thing: he learned more than everyone else. He read books, studied classics, worked his way onto service bar, and eventually into the kind of rooms he wanted to be in.

By the time the opportunity for Cloakroom came along in 2015, Whibley had spent years absorbing what was happening in New York, what was missing in Montreal, and what bars could be if you stripped away theatrics and focused on what was in the glass. The concept, tucked inside a haberdashery in the Golden Square Mile with no menu and maybe 20 seats, was a provocation of sorts in a city that hadn't quite found that register yet. It worked: Cloakroom would go on to earn four consecutive appearances on the North America's 50 Best Bars list and top-three finishes on Canada's 100 Best every year from 2023 to 2025.

Since then, Whibley has expanded his footprint downtown with Bar Dominion, a cocktail bar and dining room built on the bones of the old Dominion Square Tavern, and Le French Line, the cocktail bar within Le 9e's Île de France restaurant, a 35-seat room modelled on the golden age of transatlantic ocean liners.

Each project is a different argument about what Montreal drinkers want, and taken together they amount to something like a running theory of the city's bar scene, tested and revised in real time.

We sat down with him to find out where that theory currently stands.

Cloakroom has been on the 50 Best Bars list four years running. How much does that kind of recognition actually matter to you?

Andrew Whibley didn't get behind the bar by being the obvious choice.

When he started out as a busboy at 18, the cocktail bar—as a concept—barely existed in Montreal, and the path to bartending, he'll tell you plainly, tended to favour a certain look. So, he did the next best thing: he learned more than everyone else. He read books, studied classics, worked his way onto service bar, and eventually into the kind of rooms he wanted to be in.

By the time the opportunity for Cloakroom came along in 2015, Whibley had spent years absorbing what was happening in New York, what was missing in Montreal, and what bars could be if you stripped away theatrics and focused on what was in the glass. The concept, tucked inside a haberdashery in the Golden Square Mile with no menu and maybe 20 seats, was a provocation of sorts in a city that hadn't quite found that register yet. It worked: Cloakroom would go on to earn four consecutive appearances on the North America's 50 Best Bars list and top-three finishes on Canada's 100 Best every year from 2023 to 2025.

Andrew Whibley didn't get behind the bar by being the obvious choice.

When he started out as a busboy at 18, the cocktail bar—as a concept—barely existed in Montreal, and the path to bartending, he'll tell you plainly, tended to favour a certain look. So, he did the next best thing: he learned more than everyone else. He read books, studied classics, worked his way onto service bar, and eventually into the kind of rooms he wanted to be in.

By the time the opportunity for Cloakroom came along in 2015, Whibley had spent years absorbing what was happening in New York, what was missing in Montreal, and what bars could be if you stripped away theatrics and focused on what was in the glass. The concept, tucked inside a haberdashery in the Golden Square Mile with no menu and maybe 20 seats, was a provocation of sorts in a city that hadn't quite found that register yet. It worked: Cloakroom would go on to earn four consecutive appearances on the North America's 50 Best Bars list and top-three finishes on Canada's 100 Best every year from 2023 to 2025.