Black Sheep

An espresso martini is usually a nightcap dressed up as a novelty. At Black Sheep, it arrives built on Bushmills Irish whiskey and Guinness simple syrup, and that single swap tells you what kind of bar you have climbed the stairs to reach. This is Liberty Village's Irish cocktail bar, three floors up, where the drink list sets the terms and the kitchen answers to it. The cocktails are made by hand, down to house-made bitters, tonics, syrups, and sodas, and they are the reason to make the climb — not a side list printed to keep the food company.

The food carries the same Irish-pub accent without pretending to be a chef's tasting menu. The Traditional Irish Spice Bag is the clearest tell: crispy chicken and chips tumbled with sautéed sweet peppers, onions, chilis, a savoury spice blend, and pub-made curry sauce, a Dublin takeaway staple rebuilt as a share plate. Around it the menu spreads wide — Guinness BBQ Sliders on Ontario beef, a Guinness Beef Dip finished with Swiss, cheddar, and Guinness au jus, a Korean Fried Chicken Sandwich stacked with kimchi and Korean barbecue sauce, Black Sheep Nachos under three cheeses and lime crema, plus poutine, flatbreads, wings, and loaded tots. It is bar cooking with a few sharp edges, built to be passed around rather than plated for one.

The third-floor patio is the feature everything else orbits. It is the reason Black Sheep reads as a destination for a night out rather than a quick pint downstairs — an upstairs terrace in Liberty Village where cocktails, open air, and a mixed group all make sense at once. Screens for the game, plates built to share, and enough seats to hold a table that keeps growing: the setup rewards the kind of evening that starts as a plan for two and turns into a plan for eight. It works best when the setting is part of the point, not a bolt-on to the drink order.

The way the menu is built tells you how to use the place. The drinks lead and the food follows, which is why one table can open with a martini and close with sliders without ever committing to a sit-down dinner. The zero-proof list runs deep enough to matter: the Faux-Jito, built on zero-proof spiced rum, mango, lime, fresh basil, and mint, means the person not drinking orders off the same page as everyone else.

The bar belongs to FAB Restaurant Concepts, the Toronto hospitality company Sean Bayley founded in 1999 and built into a cluster of downtown bars and restaurants. Black Sheep is the upstairs member of that family, and the parentage shows in the operational range: a full cocktail program, a kitchen wide enough to feed a mixed group, and a third-floor patio the building was designed around. By the summer of 2020, local coverage was already placing it as an upstairs cocktail bar that showed games on the screens and ran brunch and oysters when the weather turned.

The week is short and deliberate: Wednesday through Saturday, five in the evening until two in the morning, dark the other three days. Those hours aim the whole operation at the back half of the night, when a group has already eaten somewhere or decided not to bother. Reservations are worth making for a weekend or a patio night, though the later it gets, the more the evening runs on walk-up energy. Climb to the third floor, order the espresso martini before the food, and let the Spice Bag and a plate of nachos hold the table together while the patio fills in around it. Black Sheep is less a dinner destination than a place to spend the hours after dinner belongs to someone else.