Morten Andersen has a soft spot for bars that know exactly what they are, and Locals Only knows. This is a King West late-night room that runs on oysters, classic cocktails and a graphic sensibility, not a wall of screens, and it is honest about the difference.
The bar sits at 589 King Street West, in the thick of the King West strip, tucked below the restaurant Home of the Brave. It opens at 5pm and runs until 2am seven nights a week (Restaurantji), which marks it as a venue built for the back half of the evening rather than the after-work rush. The room is small, design-led and deliberately a little eclectic, with the graphic artistry that gives the place its identity.
The kitchen is the surprise. For a bar this size, the snack menu reaches further than it needs to, and the oysters are the order most regulars name first (Locals Only official site). The drinks lean classic cocktails done properly, which suits a room that fills with King West crowd late and keeps serving while the bigger venues are emptying out.
What to order is straightforward. Start with the oysters, follow with whatever snack the board is pushing that night, and let the bartenders steer the cocktail rather than reaching for a list. The value here is in the room and the late hours, not a 30-page menu, and ordering to that strength is the way to use the place.
Who it is for is the King West regular who wants somewhere to land after dinner, the design crowd that responds to the graphic styling, and anyone who treats 11pm as the start of the evening rather than the end. It is not the room for a marquee match with the sound up, and it does not pretend to be. For Toronto bars built around screens and the game, our roundup of the best sports bars in Toronto points to the arena-scale venues instead.
Best time to go is late on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, when the King West crowd thickens and the room hits its stride past 11pm. A quieter early-week visit gets you the oysters and the cocktails without the queue, which is its own kind of evening. Avoid arriving at opening expecting a buzz, because Locals Only is a slow burn that does not warm up until the rest of the street does.
The size is the whole character. Locals Only is a compact room that trades on intimacy rather than capacity, and the graphic styling gives it a stronger sense of itself than venues three times the size. That self-assurance is rarer on King West than the volume of bars suggests, and it is the reason the place holds a regular crowd in a strip where rooms turn over fast. The late licence does the rest, keeping a steady trade long after the dinner places have called it a night. The bar staff treat the snack menu as the heart of the offer rather than an afterthought, and the oysters arrive shucked to order rather than sitting on a pre-set tray. That attention is the kind of detail that turns a one-time visitor into a regular, and on King West, where novelty usually wins over consistency, it is what gives Locals Only its staying power.
Locals Only earns its place in this guide as a King West night-owl room with a sharper kitchen than its size implies, the bar to point a visitor toward when the evening still has hours left in it. For oysters, a proper cocktail and a late crowd, it is the strip's reliable second act. For a wider tour of the city, start with our Toronto bar guide.
Sources: Locals Only official site; Restaurantji listing; Locals Only on Facebook.
