The Royal Room Cocktail Lounge

The Royal Room is the cocktail lounge on the second storey of Elora Distilling Company, open on Metcalfe Street since 2022. The room seats forty under velvet, marble and chandeliers — a deliberate nod to the grand hotel bars its founders spent years drinking in — with windows that look down over the distillery floor where the spirits are made. It is a lounge first, which shapes everything about how the kitchen works.

The food is built around the spirits rather than beside them. The kettle chips come dusted with Martini Gin No. 1 salt and truffle oil. The steamed lamb and dill dumplings sit in a Limoncello ponzu with toasted sesame, scallions and pickled chilies. The braised Ontario pork croquettes carry a Black Spiced Rum tomato chutney with pickled sweet onions and cotija. The roasted Brussels sprouts and the fried chicken sliders both run Dragon's Cry, the distillery's spicy caesar spirit — one as a dressing over crispy pork belly and croutons, the other as a chili butter on Martin's potato buns. The pork belly bao gets a Royal Amber Whiskey aioli; the sticky toffee pudding closes the menu with a Royal Amber Whiskey toffee sauce. The buttermilk-fried maitake mushrooms, with celeriac labneh and harissa butter, are the one plate that lets the kitchen step away from the bar.

The room came out of a habit. Marty Van Vliet and Mark Anderson built Elora Distilling Company after years of visiting the great hotel lobby bars, and the Art Deco styling upstairs isn't a theme laid over a bar — it's the look that started the whole project. The Royal Room carries it through to the details: sit-down tables, private booths, a wraparound bar, and the same imagination in the house spirits that fill the cocktail list, from Great Expectations Gin and Elemental Vodka to Juniperus Maximus Gin, a Sugar Maple Liqueur, and the Black Spiced Rum.

The grain-to-glass claim has real roots around Elora. The distillery's alcohol is made from Ontario grain grown by local farmers and milled at Nieuwland Mills in Elora, and a market garden supplies the botanicals, fruit, herbs and maple syrup that go into the spirits — strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, elderflowers, dill, and a juniper grove of its own. The same spirits that anchor the cocktail list are the ones turning up in the ponzu, the chutney and the toffee sauce upstairs, which is what keeps the kitchen honest to the distillery rather than borrowing its name.

The Royal Room runs Thursday through Sunday, with a Thursday Community Night from five to nine where the current food and drink features get posted to the distillery's social channels. The forty-seat capacity means reservations are encouraged, especially on weekends, and parties of eight or more need to arrange ahead. Tours, tastings, cocktail classes, private events and the seasonal Juniper Court patio fill out the rest of what the distillery does across the year. Four years in, the Royal Room is the room where the whole grain-to-glass story stops being a label on a bottle and becomes something you sit down inside.