HERE BE DRAGONS
Bar serves up drinks, food for curious nerds and geeks
While putting the finishing touches on Storm Crow Manor, Jason Kapalka is desperate for pickle juice.
Opening up later this week, the first Toronto outpost of what’s already been dubbed Canada’s “nerdiest bar” is taking shape, with several themed rooms, including a hunting lodge with the mounted head of a rancor from Star Wars, a nautilus room with portholes showing bony ghost fish swimming by, and “The Black Lodge,” which aficionados of The Shining will immediately recognize. For fans of science fiction, fantasy or genre-based entertainment, there’s plenty of fun surprises to discover.
But before it’s ready, a lone shrunken monkey head (not real, we think) sits on a shelf by a bar,
floating in murky liquid. It has some friends waiting to be submerged.
“We’ve got a bunch of weird creatures upstairs that are ready to be put up in jars, but we need pickle juice. Water just isn’t quite right, and pickle juice gives just the right look,” says Kapalka, the owner of this burgeoning geeky bar empire. “Unfortunately, the kitchen doesn’t want to give it all up, because, you know, they have to actually pickle things.”
Oh, the unique challenges of opening up a geek- and nerd-inspired establishment. Sure, plenty such places have come and gone in the city, but Manor brings it to a new level. Taking over a century-old Victorian mansion at 580 Church St. just north of Wellesley, which needed to be gutted, the 15-month renovation is nearly over. Still to come, next spring, is a 200-person patio.
Kapalka, with significant geek cred on his résumé — he was a founder of PopCap Games, creator of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies — already has two previous Storm Crow establishments in Vancouver, though they’re smaller than the Toronto outpost. So while this bar has tons of cool, geeky stuff on its walls, he knows from experience that customers will want to touch it.
“When we opened the first Storm Crow, we had a crossbow there for a while. And it was a working crossbow, and very quickly it was like, ‘we have got to take the string off of that!’ ” he says. “It’s the same with axes and swords. Any sword we had up was a) the dullest one we could get, and b) super securely mounted, because at one in the morning, there would be some guy reaching up to pull the battle axe off the wall as a joke. That’s not going to be funny, even if it’s not a very sharp battle axe.”
This bar is basically like a Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Cafe but it celebrates genre entertainment of all kind — like the two upstairs bathrooms, one decked out in Marvel Comics wallpaper, the other a throne surrounded by DC fare. There are board games to play and sci-fi on the screens. The place is the product of Kapalka’s passions, but it also shows exactly where Toronto’s bar scene is at.
“Yes, every bar needs a gimmick now,” says Chris Bellos, Storm Crow’s general manager. “But that’s because so many bars are just so similar. You need to do something to stand out.”
“This is the ultimate gimmick bar,” Kapalka admits. “And after a while, we started to embrace the gimmickiness. I think we did a dry ice drink for Halloween 2013, and it was fun, and someone said, ‘you should do this every night.’ And we were like, ‘you can’t do dry ice drinks every night,’ and then it was ‘well, why not?’ People are not coming here for a low-key, sedate Michelin star experience. The whole point of the place is to be fun and gimmicky and so stuff that you don’t do at home.”
It’s all in the name of fun, and to that end, Kapalka says that while all nerds, geeks and fans of all stripes are more than welcome, he’s also thoughtful about some of the toxic fandom that has become more prevalent online.
“We had some fans come in at first, and get all haughty with staff, like trying to test their knowledge of, say, something like Dune,” he says. “This place is going to attract hard-core fans of things, but we also want to be a place for the nerdcurious.”