Last call: Longtime bartender to Bay Street's corporate elite to pour final drink

financialpost.com:

The first days on a job can be energizing, nerve-racking, disorienting and a little awkward, which is precisely how Jeff Sansone felt almost 30 years ago when he stepped behind the shiny new bar in Canoe Restaurant for his first shift.

The swanky new establishment on the 54th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in the heart of the city’s financial district had opened a few months earlier to much fanfare, and it instantly became a magnet for Bay Street’s martini-drinking, cigar-smoking bankers, lawyers, traders and dealmakers of note, a male-leaning crowd who would loosen their ties and buy a few rounds as the evening progressed.

Everybody seemed to know everybody in those days, everybody took note of who was there and who wasn’t, and it wasn’t unheard of for a highflier to ring up $10,000 on the old corporate expense account. But what was a little different was the gender of the new bartender, a point one clearly unhappy patron addressed with the boss within earshot of the bar. The Bay Streeters of yesteryear were accustomed to “gorgeous women” preparing their drinks, not a 30-something-year-old guy from London, Ont.

“Me being hired caused a bit of a stir,” Sansone said. “It was a little awkward at first. Some customers were like, ‘Why would you put a dude behind the bar? We didn’t come here to see a dude.’”

But the dude knew how to make a drink, made them better than most, so Sansone quickly established himself as a vital cog in the “ballet” of a well-functioning, high-end restaurant, which has retained its status among the city’s corporate elite, celebrities, tourists and local sports heroes in the ensuing decades, but will be losing its chief bartender in the New Year when Sansone retires.

Toronto is not the Toronto