The Drake Hotel is a favourite spot for a lot of us in Toronto — not least of all because it never stands still. For the May long weekend they’ve debuted their Lemonade Stand on the always-fun Sky Yard patio. You can order up a Lavender Lemonade ($11), which includes Sobieski vodka, lavender syrup and lemonade, as part of the “Summer School” program that encourages the sort of behaviour that might have landed you in summer school back in the day. With the weather warming up, sort of, things will be packed up on the second deck as usual. Catch you there over the weekend.
Lavender Lemonade from the Drake
And here’s my story that ran in the Toronto Star a couple of weeks back about the Drake Trivia Night on Wednesdays.
DRAKE TRIVIA – WHERE NERDS AND HIPSTERS MEET
What stumps Toronto’s trivia guy is a question that most pertains to him: How big will his competition grow?
Each Wednesday since August, Terrance Balazo has set up his laptop in a booth at the Drake Hotel reserved for DJs and prepared to unleash 30 or so questions on a suspecting audience. Within the past eight weeks, Trivia Night at the Drake has been sold out three times, with close to 200 people filling the hotel’s lounge restaurant to capacity. A March edition in the middle of Canadian Music Fest brought in the largest audience yet, according to the host. Participants pay $2 each and most play in teams of two to four, answering questions that range from the obscure (what country’s flag is entirely green?) to Balazo’s version of Name That Tune, which will test your sanity as well as your recall, and queries tied to hilarious visual clips (watching William Shatner speaking in Esperanto in a scene from “Incubus” was better comedy than Charlie Sheen provided in Toronto recently).
“I’m surprised how full it is every week,” says Balazo, who is also an actor and the artistic director of Cow Over Moon Children’s Theatre. “I don’t think the kind of night it is is what people go to the Drake for traditionally.”
Adrian Brijbassi 