Last month I met a friend for a drink at the Writers Room atop the Park Hyatt.
It was 4 o’clock, early for a drink, and the bar was empty except for my friend who was sitting inside at a table. Beyond her and outside was the open-air rooftop terrace. It was a gorgeous day so I said: “Why don’t we sit outside?” She paused, and said a bit awkwardly, “No, let’s not.”
She then explained that when she came in five minutes earlier she had the same idea, until the maitre’d told her that sitting outside comes with a $50-per-person “commitment.” Or rather, a minimum spend of $50 each. In other words, our drink would cost us $100. Plus tax and tip, so $125. And I only drink Diet Coke.
That seemed a lot.
By any standard, the Writers Room is a lovely place for a drink. The view is sensational, its Yorkville location is hard to beat, and the room carries the accumulated mythology of the old Park Plaza Roof Lounge, a home to writers, actors, musicians, artists and people who wanted to be any of those things.
You can describe this fresh new hell as “business class drinking,” “overly conspicuous consumption,” or even “time to kill the rich.”
Frankly, I prefer the more acronymic moniker:
WTF.
I mean, you book a table inside and you’re a customer. But book a table outside, at a table and chair made with the same wood, on the very same floor, served by the very same staff, ordering from the very same cocktail list, and suddenly you’ve become a revenue unit required to clear a $50 hurdle before you’re allowed to feel the breeze or catch the sun.
When I asked the nice lady who escorted me to my seat if this extra charge was for real, she replied that it was a “per person commitment.”
I don’t fear that word; I fear for it. The Park Hyatt is asking it to do a great deal of work on its behalf. You make a commitment to a spouse, a cause, a mortgage, or even a nation. Indeed, many millions of people have given their lives making that commitment. So dressing it up in a dinner jacket in order to extort money from Canadians who just want to sit in the sun for an hour insults both them and it.
It’s important to clarify that this is not the $50 penalty you pay when you book dinner at a high-end restaurant on Open Table and fail to show up. They’ve held the table for you and didn’t give it to the people waiting in line at the front of the restaurant. There are only so many tables and an empty one is perishable inventory the restaurant can never get back. So I get that.
The Writers Room’s reservation listing is admirably candid: the terrace experience runs from May 23 to October 1 and requires the $50 charge “to ensure dedicated use of the reserved tables and space.” But their transparency does not make their policy less absurd. It merely makes the absurdity easier to book online.
Minimum spends are not new, and Toronto has plenty of examples. There’s Kasa Moto which has a minimum spend (gulp) of $1,500 per seating. That rises to $2,000 for later-night seating. Bar Neon has patio and buyout minimums in the thousands of dollars for exclusive use. And Aera imposes a per-person minimum for groups of eight or more. But these three are obviously commercial. Take your friends and you tie up a big part of their business.
But one person or a couple wanting an outdoor table at a bar? That’s a whole other moral universe: you are now in the land of yield management with potted plants.
Take something that used to be included in the basic transaction, like sunshine or breeze. Then separate it out. Then give it a soothing name and insist that no one is being charged for it. Airlines are the real masters at this. Last year, North American airlines made a combined USD $8.5 – $9 billion in baggage fees alone. Many more hotels now charge “resort fees,” “destination fees,” and “urban amenity fees,” including for WiFi, fitness room access, and a newspaper you can read on your phone.
What’s next? How about a $20 charge to sit near a fireplace in January? An $8 a day elevator fee to access floors above the lobby? A $5 lobby-chair fee to sit you wait in the lobby for your Uber? All of these could be ‘next-stage commitments’ for the Park Hyatt and its Writers Room.
The old Roof Lounge knew that their customers were not merely consumers of alcohol.
You went up there because it felt like a small, civilized escape above Bloor Street. You paid too much for your drink, naturally. That was part of the deal. But you were not asked to prove, in advance, that you deserved the chair.
So, by all means, visit the Writers Room. It will always be an iconic bar on the rooftop of the Park Hyatt, with a genuine claim to history and a splendid view. Order a cocktail. Admire the city. Tip generously.
But if you want to sit outside, remember: the view is free. The chair is not.
Meanwhile…
1. The Prime Minister of the Netherlands would like a quiet word with you.
2. Your mortal coil. How to be young, delivered in 30 seconds; a five‑stage meditation called The Five Stages of Harland; an encyclopedia of ideas by women philosophers; and a promise to your future self via FutureMe; just write the letter and mail it forward.
3. The dating file. Arthur Brooks explains why Bumble now lets women message first, and the Literary Review profiles a professional virgin; plus America’s rich and their first dates; Sigmund Freud, revisited on Freud and the sexual revolution; and a modest question from Experimental History: is greatness next to thickness?
4. Style, and its ghosts. Graydon Carter tells you what to wear; Airmail on why Deadheads still Rul; plus the regret of flacking for the Tate brothers; and a guide for lonely influencers: Are you beautiful? Are you influential?
5. Dance in five doses. See Dance; more More Dance; and Even More Dance; and even Most Dance.
6. Words and writers. Reading Maps draws fictional worlds onto real ones; plus your own private spelling bee. Plus a working writer’s advice you should pin somewhere: Navigating by aliveness. Then Ordinary Abundance, for a gentler daily read.
7. Previewing favourites. Four great dramatic series start new streaming seasons. On September 8, Fauda on Netflix; On September 16, Slow Horses on Apple TV; on October 15, The Diplomat on Netflix; and on January 2, The Pitt on HBO, plus The Pitt satire on SNL.
Bonus: directors’ fingerprints, a slide gallery of visual tics you’ll never unsee.
8. Fly away. Dine Magazine on the alchemy of water in Tohoku, the place for people who’ve been everywhere; El Al thinks now is the time to fly to Israel. CNN on premium airplane seats and their empty rows; the nearbyWiki page that turns any location into a small museum on your phone; and the world’s largest cities, 1950–2100, a map of where the future lives.
9. Voices, of a sort. Get a real London accent in 45 seconds; a multilingual party trick worth learning; the Times audiobook boom, filtered through what’s your name again? and, this week the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction announced its long-list. As the judges said (over and over), extra-ooooordinary!
10. Money, markets, and the maple‑leaf moment. How much do engineers make? and how to be a microlender. Kiva has been quietly at it for years. Plus where old technology works better than new, a video for people who kept their thermostat dial; plus the economics of Swifties, a real‑world case study in fandom‑as‑market; and finally, The 401, a small object lesson in consumption.
11. Beavers, birds, and other engineers. Are beavers actually good at building dams? — a proper answer at last; the aforementioned search‑and‑rescue concept drone that behaves like a bird; a pyrosociologist on why our wildfires got so bad; and Dave Barry on the cold plunge, which is what beavers do all day.
12. Clarification. Last week, we showed you these amazing ballerinas forming a giant dog. Fantastic! Unfortunately, fake, as a reader wrote to tell us. They were made with AI. The world is full of trickery. Sorry about that.
Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.