Corks & Platters wine bar serves up quirky charisma
Owner Krista Pollett a whirlwind of energy and inspiration behind wine bar
Corks & Platters might be the most adorable wine bar you will ever visit.
This compact storefront on Queen St. E. just past the hubbub of the Beach strip (near Beech Ave. and across the street from the infamous Goof) belongs in a shabby chic decor magazine.
The bar is made from old barn board. The stools are made of logs, as are the platters. The lights are mostly rigged up in old mason jars. The tables are homemade and painted a faux-distressed white.
The entire back wall is a blackboard with the bar’s small-plate menu prettily written down on its surface. The basement women’s washroom is a total delight, crammed with vintage vases and other tchotchkes.
The cosy result can all be traced back to the hand — and absurd energy level — of owner Krista Pollett.
This whirlwind is a former stay-athome mom, a master taster and a maker of just about everything you sit on and use in this stylish place.
Oh yeah — she’s not a painter, but did all the artwork on the walls, too. “I love creating,” she says in explanation.
This woman who never sleeps comes from Toronto but spent the last few decades in Guelph, Ont., raising her kids. She learned how to fix things around the house. She parented, cooked, wielded drills.
Then Pollett got divorced. So she bought, fixed up, ran and then sold a B&B. Then, in 2007, she headed to the Niagara Region to return to nursing school (she’d left that career when she became a parent).
While waiting for her next intake to start, she casually enrolled in some master taster courses at Niagara College.
She loved what she was learning, and, prompted by a comment from a stranger (“You’re personality is so great. This is a wine region! Don’t go back to nursing”) she enrolled full-time.
After her master taster diploma, Pollett got jobs at wineries and travelled, working in the wine harvest around the world. She learned a lot, but the money just wasn’t there.
“I loved it so much. So I decided to do it myself.”
Wanting to go back home to Toronto, she found this location in the Beach and got to work. Over the course of last spring, she set to the task with a hammer and nail.
A farmer friend from Guelph offered wood and, sometimes, expertise. Everything she found in the garbage, at vintage shops and on the farm was a new design idea.
Opened in June, Pollett’s bar has been busy in the early evenings, mainly with women who meet up to chat, sample Pollett’s often made-in-Ontario wines and munch on cheese and charcuterie.
And Pollett stays busy making her own beef jerky, visiting her suppliers (she picks up many of her menu items personally), chatting with customers about wine and nabbing things like an old ladder out of the garbage.
“I know I can do something with it,” she says.