Marcus Night Bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Montreal has a new cocktail menu, offering a $75 tasting experience that lets you try five drinks without the full-size commitment.
Head of Mixology Jay Lawson's tasting menu features drinks poured at roughly two-thirds the size of a standard cocktail. The format, available Thursday through Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m., is built for pacing—some guests finish in an hour, others stretch it over two. "I don't want someone to have the tasting and just be finished and not be able to go out for the rest of the night," Lawson says.
The tasting opens with a tepache made from fermented pineapple skins and cores, finished with honeydew, cantaloupe, green peppercorn, allspice, clove, and a hint of mint distillate. From there, it moves through a sesame-washed Glenfiddich highball called Golden Square Mile, a clarified milk punch (Clear Intentions) built on Patrón Silver and Perfecto Amor, a non-alcoholic palate cleanser with Seedlip Grove and caper-olive brine, and closes with Savage Garden—a stirred gimlet riff with rum agricole, Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla, local tomato wine from Omerto, and Cocchi Rosa vermouth.
Lawson's approach leans heavily on aromatics rather than physical garnishes. He studied perfume books in 2022 and applies that thinking to his drinks (lime leaf sprays, orange distillates, dill tinctures) to enhance them without getting in the way of actually drinking it.
"I'm very minimal when it comes to garnishes," he says. "The garnish is the glass, the room, and the service."
The sustainability angle is more than marketing: Lawson sources ingredients from within the hotel where possible, including that tomato wine from Omerto, a Quebec producer that's been making wine from tomatoes for 15 years. He also brings back fermentation techniques he used during his time at STILLIFE, something he hadn't been able to explore much during a five-year stint at Cloakroom, where he worked without a menu.
The tasting menu exists alongside Marcus's regular cocktail menu, which features 12 cocktails and three non-alcoholic options.
People use the tasting in different ways—as a pre-dinner lead-in before heading to Marcus, as a date night format, or as a birthday kick-off before going out.
Lawson doesn't push the pacing; it's designed to unfold however the guest wants it to.
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