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Le Vieux Dublin Pub & Restaurant
The city's oldest Irish pub has the expected great selection of brews (about C$6 per pint) and live Celtic or pop music nightly. Curries rub shoulders with burgers on the menu.
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Les Folies
A cross between a bar, café and club, the oh-so-chic Folies has a DJ every night spinning trendy music and, much more importantly, the only sidewalk terrace on ave du Mont-Royal. Too-thin models and creative types breeze in for a quick 'Zen' sandwich or a 'Buddha' salad with mineral water before evaporating into the night.
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Les Trois Brasseurs
This chain of European beer-brewers has set up a great locale in the Quartier Latin. Four homegrown brews are always on tap and the menu has a number of great bistro-style bites. Summer's the best time because the sliding garage doors let in the cool night air.
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Lion D'or
This classy 1930s-style club draws beautiful people and visiting film-production crews. Patrons spin on the spacious wooden dance floor to killer party bands playing sophisticated rock and retro-pop. It's often used for private events so check the listings.
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Mad Hatter
This bar in a nondescript area of de Maisonneuve kept generations of students from the nearby Concordia and McGill Universities happy. It's recently picked up and moved to the ultra-trendy rue Crescent nearby. The regulars used to the old location seem a little disoriented here but bizarrely the new spot is working. It has a comfy bar and a DJ-driven house with R&B and hip-hop on different nights of the week.
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Metropolis
To shake with the multitudes, visit Metropolis, which has Canada's largest dance floor (capacity 2300). Housed in a former Art Deco cinema, this place features live bands and DJs, bars spread over three floors and dazzling sound and light shows. There's no set schedule, so check the listings for what's on. The box office is at 1413 rue St-Dominique.
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Parking Nightclub
With the right wardrobe you can celebrate Halloween every night at Parking, a very cruisy, steamy, and for the time being, utterly sexy gay nightclub. Located in an old garage repair shop, the club is decorated with car parts and tools. The Cruising Bar upstairs opens nightly, the disco Wednesday to Saturday with theme nights. The Le Parking bar and the fetishist Donjon club are eventful arms of the same complex.
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Peel Pub
This barn of a pub is a student institution for its cheap pitchers of beer and greasy-spoon menu. During televised sporting events fans hurl vocal abuse at the 30 big-screen TVs and it gets so crowded it's hard to move.
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Pub Ste-Élisabeth
Tucked off a side street, this awesome little pub is positively revered by Montrealers for its vine-covered courtyard and drink menu that includes beers galore, whiskeys and ports. It's got a mind-whirring repertoire of beers on tap, including imports and rare-to-find elsewhere microbrewery fare like Boréal Noir and Cidre Mystique.
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Saloon
This bar-bistro with the Big Ben clock face earned a spot in Village hearts for its chilled atmosphere, cocktails and 'five-continents' menu including some good vegetarian options. This is a stylish pre-club pit stop.
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Sat
The clock runs backwards over the bar at the Societé des Arts Technologiques, a cutting-edge warehouse space that promotes partying as much as digital art. DJs and performance artists push the envelope with banks of multimedia installations, but the wooden picnic tables and plastic beer cups recall its university links.
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Sir Winston Churchill Pub
Winnie's cavernous, split-level pub draws an older anglo crowd with its multiple bars, pool tables and pulsating music. The late great author Mordecai Richler used to knock back cold ones in the bar upstairs. Meals are served all day and drinks are half-price from to .
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Sky Pub & Club
This is one of those popular Village complexes designed to suck you in for an entire Saturday night of partying. If you're a gorgeous guy or looking for one, start the evening in the 1st-floor pick-up pub (low lighting for intimate chat) before heading up to the dance floors (disco and energized house/hip-hop). The roof terrace is a perfect place to catch the Loto Québec International Fireworks Competition in summer.
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Stereo
Montréal's house music giant, the sound system here is so amazing regulars gush about out-of-body-experiences. Stereo attracts everyone - gay, straight, students, drag queens - in short, anyone looking to lose sleep in style. You can warm up at the adjacent Stereobar from to .
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Thursday's
Right next door to Winnie's, this lively singles place attracts hordes of fun-loving tourists and Montrealers looking for an easy place to paint the town red. Smoked bagels with cream cheese are the specialty on a menu that spans gourmet bites. The mammoth bars and two-level dance floor appeal to the after-work crowd as well as night owls.
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Tokyo Bar
Draws a dead chic crowd in their late 20s and early 30s for its water-filled backlit bar and sunken circular sofas that dwarf their occupants. Infectious pop, rock and New Age wafts over its impeccably wrapped patrons on two dance floors. The rooftop bar gets going around midnight.
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Tour de Ville Bar
This padded upscale bar at the top of the Delta Hotel tower affords a splendid view of downtown Montréal. Cocktails are particularly costly but nursing one is fun, as is sizing up the office crowd from the nearby financial district.
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Typhoon Lounge
Young yuppies, anglo and francophone, slip in to this watering hole for a beer and chicken legs on the way home or camp out for jazz, blues and world beats. It's hard to shake the office-worker ambience but on summer nights it's a good pitstop while cruising ave Monkland.
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Unity II
Tragically burnt down just before the 2006 World Outgames - the owners miraculously managed to open just in time. It's now got the attention of everyone for its tenacity and work ethic in pulling off the impossible. The kitsch Bamboo bar is good for an incense-filled pop break while the Chill-Out Room appeals for its pool tables and leather benches for watching. The lovely rooftop terrace is a quiet getaway on summer evenings.
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