Between Ontario Craft Beer Week, the Toronto Festival of Beer, the Golden Tap Awards, CASK! Socials every couple of months, and myriad new bars, brewers, brewery markets, and sausage halls popping up every time you try to take a break to dry out, Toronto’s craft beer scene has come a long way since that first [...]

This is April Wozny, and we’re assured she doesn’t usually look or dress like this. “Buzz ‘hoods pop up and then inflate like giant, shiny balloons,” wrote Toronto.com’s Stacey McLeod on February 3, 2009, “until the pricks roll in and pop them.” Bouncing from joint to joint along what was then a freshly trendified strip, [...]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Last time we checked on 178 Bathurst Street, it was just beginning to relive its Bassmint-era techno days with Derrick May at Crosstown, now closed. Since then, things underneath the Queen Street West and Bathurst Street Pizza Pizza have come full circle. Until 1999, Christian "DJ Unabomber" Poulson operated Bassmint, a famous party spot and afterhours that still conjures memories of sleepless nights for...

Photos courtesy of Light in the Attic Records The landscape of soul music, more than any other genre, has been littered with talented artists with unfulfilled careers spent in obscurity, grinding out appearances in dingy bars in the search for the elusive radio hit. Such was the fate of Jay Douglas, The Mighty Pope and many other pioneers of Toronto’s soul and reggae scene in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists—who are reuniting for...

The National Post is reporting today that Coyote Ugly––the raunchy, almost-a-strip-club-bar that inspired a Jerry Bruckheimer movie that everyone, including Piper Perabo, forgot about five years ago––will open up its first Canadian "saloon" next year at 220 Adelaide Street West. Coyote Ugly is upfront about its intentions: on their website, the bar explains the "business plan" of its first owner, Lil' Lovell, was "beautiful girls + booze = money." The organization's slogan is "Don't Just...

There used to be a sign above a video arcade that proclaimed "Yonge Street is Fun Street." Back in the 1960s and 1970s, much of that fun was to be had at the many bars and clubs that lined the street south of Gerrard––Le Coq D'Or, Steele's Tavern, Friar's Tavern, Zanzibar Tavern and so on. Depending on the venue, you could listen to music, dance the night away or catch a striptease. Today's advertiser...

Rosie DiManno sucks. Every day, poor Toronto Star readers are subjected to another over-the-top, awkwardly-written, occasionally-insulting column about the day's top depressing story from the purple-streaked purveyor of pulp. Torontoist, for one, can't take it anymore. The Evidence We really really didn't want to post two DiManno columns in one week. (Really.) But today, DiManno dropped her most recent column, "Finally, the blowhard's behind bars," about the Richard Wills case––yes, another one––and, well, the ending...

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Black Monday, the biggest one-day stock market plunge in history. On October 19, 1987, Bay Street was shocked to see all the key market indices plummet. The TSE 300 lost over 400 points as, in a frenzy of panicked selling, a record 77 million shares were desperately traded on [...]

If there is one thing Toronto is world-class in and world-renowned for, it is dance music. Toronto sees some of the world’s most famous international music acts play its bars and clubs every weekend, and according to a recent article in Toronto Life, they bring with them at least $125 million in economic activity. Well, [...]

You know all those flashy LED lights on the CN Tower? Apparently they’re going to get flashier by this Thursday. U of T is set to approve the plan to build a $53 million Centre for High Performance Sport just west of Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. Maybe their football team could start training to [...]

Summer: the official season of barbecues, cottages and having a nice cold beer. To honour the finest microbrews in the GTA and Ontario, The Bar Towel is once again asking for the public to vote for the 2007 Golden Tap Awards and have a voice in who should go home with one of the eight [...]