Cheers to the Montreal Dive Bar
Barroom historian David Wondrich defines a dive as “the kind of bar where nobody judges you — and you don’t get to judge them either.” That’s what I found when I stumbled upon my first dive, the legendary Bar Diana in Montreal’s Shaughnessy Village.
It was 1986. I was 21 years old and thirsty for a nightcap after attending a Stevie Wonder concert at the nearby Forum. The smoky bar was a dump, but Sinatra was playing on the jukebox, and the people — middle-aged hookers and vets downing quarts of beer — were welcoming. I’ve loved a fabulous dive ever since.
Bar Diana survived another quarter-century, to be replaced by a hip retro tavern called Moose Bawr. In the past few years, Montreal has lost more of its beloved dives, including PrimeTime, Snack N’ Blues and La Petite Idée Fixe, to forces of the economy, the pandemic, and gentrification. It’s a trend seen in cities across North America.
Dive bars are closing at a terrifying rate
Wondrich lamented in an episode of the Daily Beast’s Life Behind Bars podcast, called “Are Dive Bars an Endangered Species?” But in Montreal, the loss hits harder because these seedy joints are such a big part of our identity.
The romanticized mythology goes back to Montreal’s Sin City era. During Canadian and U.S. Prohibition, Quebec was one of the few places where it was still legal to drink. Montreal quickly became a nightclub capital, and the debauchery kept rolling until Mayor Jean Drapeau’s morality-squad cleanups in the 1960s and ’70s closed many watering holes.
During the economic downtown of the ’90s, Montreal rents were cheap, and so was the booze at friendly old dives — a perfect recipe for the city’s artistic and cultural rebirth. Older places remained popular, such as Taverne Midway on the lower Main, where the décor seemed unchanged since its 1927 opening. And new places came along.
They’re called dive bars because they’re usually in the basement of old buildings
says Ziggy Eichenbaum, who opened the unpretentious Ziggy’s Pub on Crescent in 1996. “People like coming downstairs because it’s not as loud as other bars…. Everybody leaves everybody alone, but if you want to start a conversation, there’s always a friendly face. It’s the clientele that gives the bar its character.”
At Ziggy’s, where the bartenders still free pour, the habitués included some of the city’s most famous boulevardiers — journalist Nick Auf der Maur (my mentor), author Mordecai Richler and Montreal radio icon Terry DiMonte. They were as approachable as any other regular.
Over at Barfly, a live-music dive in the Plateau with sticky floors and Habs banners hanging from the ceiling, staff and regulars often joke that this is the place “where everybody knows your name, but everyone’s too drunk to remember it.”
While some Montreal dives succumbed during the pandemic, others slouched on. Barfly marked its 25th anniversary in 2021, when Patrick Watson showed up for a surprise set that attracted the likes of Adam Cohen. “It was just the lift we needed,” says co-owner Gwendolyn Gauthier. At Ziggy’s, hip-hop star Drake stopped in and left a $10,000 tip. “Something small to help you through,” he whispered to Eichenbaum.
The latest threat to authentic dives is the upscale-dive-bar trend — “an of-the-moment concept that’s meant to be a step above a sticky-floored dive offering beers and stale pretzels, but a notch below a high-volume joint slinging highfalutin $20 cocktails,” VinePair observed. Montreal has a few of these, offering cheap drinks and a lack of pretension — some, like the lower-level Double’s Late Night in Mile End, filling the void of neighbourhood dives that have closed.
The old guard is skeptical. “We have survived because of the community,” says Gauthier. That type of loyalty and authenticity takes years to build. Or, in the words of Wondrich, to build a true dive “takes generations of deferred maintenance.”
— Richard Burnett