MEMENTO MORI.

Most bars provide drinks, music and a table. The rest is left entirely to the people sitting there.

We wanted to design more of the conditions around an evening without deciding what the evening had to become. That meant brewing beer in the building. Making rooms that did not all feel the same. Adding games people could start without planning. Leaving room for birthdays, tournaments, strangers, regulars and coworkers to use the place differently.

There is no correct way through Memento. You can stay at the bar, move upstairs, start a game, find another room or spend the whole night talking over one table.

The place provides the possibilities. The people decide what happens.

The idea of opening a brewery had been there for more than a decade. There was never enough time, money or space to make it real while running other businesses.

Near the end of the pandemic, everything had slowed down. It was a hard stretch, but it made the opening to finally build the place that had been waiting.

The building was five minutes from home. Alexander passed it regularly on Saint-Patrick Street, beside the Lachine Canal — 2471 rue Saint-Patrick had housed offices and distribution for Sharp, and it did not look like a brewery or a bar.

That was part of the opportunity.

The corporate interior came out, and the building was divided into spaces with different personalities.

The brewery stayed visible. The yellow staircase connected the two floors. Games became part of the rooms instead of a separate arcade. The bar, the tables, the art and the strange objects were allowed to look collected rather than perfectly coordinated.

Memento was designed as a place people could explore — not a room where everyone is assigned the same chair.

Before Memento, we made escape games.

Building A/Maze taught us that people connect differently when they have something to discover together. They talk, solve, disagree, laugh and leave with a shared reference that belongs to their group.

But an escape game has a timer and an ending. Memento took the observation behind those games and turned it into something new. There is no one-hour format and no final puzzle. The whole building is the format: beer, food, rooms, games and people moving between them.

Memento is its own brewery, restaurant, team and community. The connection to A/Maze Entertainment Group stays part of its creative roots — and it makes it possible to combine venues for larger group events — but Memento stands on its own.

Beer has history, chemistry, ritual and personality. It can carry an idea through a recipe, a name, a label, an ingredient or a collaboration. It also has a simple social purpose: people gather around it.

At Memento the beer is designed and brewed in the same building where it is served. Jeka and Dmitrii can develop an idea, put it in a tank, and hear what guests think a few metres away.

Beer is one part of Memento, and an important one. It gives the place its own product, its own rhythm and a reason to keep changing.

For most of the project the place had another working name. Ten days before opening, it became Memento.

A memento is an object connected to a person, a place or a memory. The phrase memento mori means remember that you must die. It can sound dark. We understood it differently: life is short, so pay attention to the people, places and evenings that deserve it.

Order the beer you have not tried. Start the game. Invite the people you keep meaning to see. Stay when the conversation is going well.

Memento is the place. Mori is the reminder.

Mori is the bulldog who turns up throughout Memento.

He is part host, part guide and part troublemaker. He is on cans, menus, signs and small details hidden around the building.

He does not explain the place. He keeps an eye on it.

Memento was designed when small gatherings still looked like the future. People quickly had other plans.

A friend’s birthday became one of the first real nights in the building. Then came office parties, chess players, trivia, tournaments, screenings, regulars, families, tourists, and people who came for one drink and found another reason to stay.

Today several completely different evenings can happen here at the same time. That is not a departure from the original idea. It is the idea working.