Set 'Em Up!

Men & women had queued up outside the new bars, but when they got inside, they seemed ill at ease. It was plain that in sedate Toronto, where last week, for the first time in 31 years,* it became legal to drink hard liquor in public, the people had forgotten how it was done.

Four hotels, two restaurants and one nightclub that were lucky enough to get licenses the first week (later there would be others, in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario) had tried hard to make the atmosphere right. The Barclay Hotel called its new bar the Elbow Room, dressed it up with murals. It was jammed ten minutes after the doors opened.

The Winston Grill served cocktails from a bar hardly bigger than its baby-grand piano. The renovated Club Norman (once a servicemen's hangout and now Toronto's only real nightclub) had two bars: a Circus Room (striped awnings, murals that featured animals and weightlifters) and a Starlight Room (a synthetically starlit ceiling, oval bar, an imported floor show). Some 2,300 shoved into the club on opening night.

But out-of-practice Torontonians did not seem to get the hang of it. They averaged, said bartenders, only two drinks apiece (the favorite: rye highballs; second choice: gin drinks), and some just paid a cover charge to gawk. Perhaps it was the prices, which to many a customer seemed to be over proof. Samples: anywhere from 45-c- to $1.60 for highballs (1 1/4 ounces of whiskey per drink), $1.10 for Planter's Punch, 60-c- for Martinis and Manhattans, 95-c- for Side Cars, $1.60 for the fancy Zombie (featuring six varieties of rum).

Most proprietors and bartenders thought business would boom until Toronto had satisfied its curiosity, then would dip. Some Canada-reared drinkers seemed to think so too. After sampling the Circus Bar's atmosphere and a few of its drinks, one unimpressed Torontonian walked out muttering: "Give me a beer any time."

* Until last week, Quebec was the only province to permit public drinking of anything harder than beer and wine.

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