Business & Pleasure

Inglewood's Two-Part Act

The front of the building at 1327b 9 Ave SE tells one story: Super Variety, a neighbourhood coffee bar and bottle shop doing what neighbourhood coffee bars and bottle shops do, with the low-key approachability of a place that has no interest in impressing you. Walk around back and the register shifts entirely. Business & Pleasure is a 21-seat cocktail bar that runs warm, lively, and deliberately familiar — a room that lands somewhere between a well-curated dive and a serious drinks program, without visibly straining toward either pole.

Calgary's Inglewood neighbourhood has developed a bar scene with genuine character over the past decade. Unlike the polished, high-density strips closer to the downtown core, Inglewood draws venues that tend to favour specificity over scale. Business & Pleasure fits that pattern: small capacity, a clear aesthetic point of view, and a menu architecture that rewards the curious without intimidating the casual. It belongs to the same city-wide current that has produced bars like Proof and Shelter, each operating with a distinct identity rather than defaulting to the generic cocktail-bar formula.

What Studio North Built

The interior is the work of Studio North, and it carries the Calgary firm's tendency to find warmth in structural materials. The vaulted ceiling constructed from fir plywood is the room's most visible move: raw enough to read as unfussy, resolved enough to feel considered. In a city where bar interiors often default either to exposed-industrial minimalism or to decorative maximalism, this sits in a narrower, more confident space. The ceiling does what good bar architecture should — it makes the room feel like somewhere rather than nowhere, without demanding that you notice it every ten minutes.

Twenty-one seats is a number that defines the experience as much as any design decision. At that scale, the room fills fast, the noise level stays human, and the bar staff operate within range of almost every table. Canadian cocktail bars operating in this format , Atwater Cocktail Club in Montreal and Humboldt Bar in Victoria both work within comparable capacity constraints , tend to generate the kind of repeat-visit loyalty that larger venues rarely sustain, because the intimacy of the room creates something closer to a neighbourhood relationship than a transaction.

The Drinks: Nostalgia as a Method

The menu arrives formatted like a golf scorecard, which is either the kind of detail you find charming or the kind you find unnecessary, and that ambiguity is somewhat the point. Business & Pleasure is not a bar that takes itself seriously in the ways that some serious bars do. What it takes seriously is execution.

Nostalgia is the underlying method here, applied with more discipline than the word usually implies. The Chic-A-Cherry Cola , a highball built from cola syrup, egg white, gin, and cherry bitters , is a useful example of how the approach works in practice. The flavour reference is immediate and legible (cola, cherry), but the construction is specific: egg white changes the texture, gin shifts the base away from the obvious, and cherry bitters add a structural layer that plain cola syrup alone would flatten. The result is a drink that feels familiar on first sip and more interesting on the second.

That same logic applies across the Canadian cocktail scene's better programs. Bars like Botanist Bar in Vancouver and Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu have established that the most durable cocktail menus are built on technical specificity applied to accessible references , not on difficulty for its own sake. Business & Pleasure operates in that register, with a format that makes the menu feel approachable rather than intimidating, while the drinks themselves carry more craft than the casual presentation suggests.

The Food: Bar Snacks, Taken Seriously

Bar food at this level of the market tends to split into two camps: afterthought provision (the bowl of mixed nuts, the underpowered charcuterie board) and overwrought small plates that arrive with unnecessary fine-dining framing. Business & Pleasure sits in a more useful position. The food menu is explicitly an ode to bar snacks, and it commits to that brief without apology.

The tiny Cubano sandwiches deliver a proportion that makes sense for a 21-seat room where people are drinking rather than dining. Baked Brillat-Savarin cheese is a technically specific choice: Brillat-Savarin is a triple-cream French cheese with enough fat content to hold texture under heat, and baking it produces a result that reads as comfort food while remaining a more considered product than the category usually gets. Sour-cream-and-onion popcorn closes the loop on the nostalgic register established by the drinks menu , a flavour that belongs to the snack-food vocabulary of North American childhood, translated into something worth ordering at a bar that has a vaulted fir-plywood ceiling.

The bar snack format connects to a broader pattern across Canada's smaller cocktail venues. Bar Mordecai in Toronto, Missy's, and Grecos in Kingston have each demonstrated that the most effective bar food programs at this scale are built around snacks that amplify the drinking experience rather than compete with it. Small, flavour-forward, easy to share across a table of two or four , the format matches the room.

Where It Sits in Calgary's Cocktail Geography

Calgary's cocktail bar scene has been developing with increasing confidence, and Inglewood has emerged as one of the neighbourhoods where that development is most visible. 33 Acres Brewing Company Calgary represents the craft-beer end of the same neighbourhood's drinks culture, while Bearfoot Bistro in Whistler offers a point of comparison for what premium bar programming looks like at greater scale and price point. Business & Pleasure operates at the neighbourhood end of the spectrum, with pricing and format that make it accessible without being cheap about the product.

The dual-identity setup , Super Variety in front, Business & Pleasure behind , functions as a practical differentiator. The bottle shop element means the venue has a daytime-facing identity separate from its evening cocktail program, which reduces dependence on a single revenue window and gives the address a reason to exist outside bar hours. For the visitor, it means the address works as both a daytime stop and an evening destination, depending on which door you use. For a full picture of how Business & Pleasure fits into Calgary's broader food and drink programming, see our full Calgary restaurants guide.

Planning Your Visit

Business & Pleasure is at 1327b 9 Ave SE in Inglewood, behind Super Variety. At 21 seats, the bar fills quickly on weekend evenings, and the small capacity means walk-ins during peak hours carry some risk. Arriving earlier in the evening or mid-week gives a better chance of getting a seat without a wait. The neighbourhood is walkable from the Inglewood/Ramsay CTrain station, and street parking along 9 Ave SE is generally available outside rush periods.