Dunlevy: Legendary Montreal rock bar Bifteck celebrates 30-plus years of cool

Montreal Gazette

27-05-2025

The world may be moving at a bewildering pace, but anyone who ever set foot inside Bifteck will be relieved to know that nothing — and I mean nothing — has changed.
Officially called Bar Bifteck St-Laurent, Bifteck is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its '90s heyday Thursday starting at 6 p.m. The place itself is approximately a decade older than that. It was reportedly a strip club back in the 1970s, then a steakhouse. Then at some point in the mid-'80s, it became a bar — nothing special, just a regular drinking hole with a couple of pool tables and cheap beer on a desolate and sometimes scary strip of St-Laurent. There was little to suggest it would become the epicentre of alt-rock cool just a few years later.
Nancy Ross was a 19-year-old McGill student in 1990, working as a cocktail waitress at Gibbys steakhouse in Old Montreal. On her way home to the Plateau, she would stop off at Bifteck because she knew the bartender, a Portuguese guy named Luis.
She was sitting at the bar a few days after quitting Gibbys when Luis offered her a job as a bartender.
'It was my hangout, so it was great,' Ross said. She is hosting Bifteck's sort-of 30th anniversary party with former waitress Susan Moss and owner Jose da Eira, 71, who bought Bifteck in 1995 from a fellow Portuguese expat.
What was working at Bifteck like in those days?
'It was absolutely non-stop,' Ross said. 'You would start your shift at 8:30 and you wouldn't stop until last call. It just seemed to attract everybody, and then everybody kept coming here because this is where everybody was.'
Walking into Bifteck in the early '90s was like walking into Montreal's hippest house party. It was a melting pot of alt-rockers, skaters, locals, university students and staff from Montreal's four cultural weeklies as well as a little magazine called Voice of Montreal, which became VICE. There was (and still is) free popcorn, loud music and, again, cheap beer.
'It was just a real community,' Ross said. 'It was all artists and punk-minded people, and definitely musicians — but you didn't know (what people did). You might be drinking next to a plumber, and you might be drinking next to a guy who plays in a band that goes on tour around the world.'
It was the heyday of grunge and the last decade of the pre-internet era. The tastemaking soundtrack of underground rock and rap was lazily overseen by tape-flipping cassette jockeys at the back of the bar — one of whom, Melissa Auf der Maur, would go on to play bass in Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. Later in the decade, her then-boyfriend Dave Grohl would drop in when his band passed through town.
Also spotted at the bar over the years have been members of REM, Garbage, Pixies, Rancid and Blink-182, to name a few. And then there are all the Montreal bands: Doughboys, Bootsauce, Me Mom and Morgentaler, Bionic, Shades of Culture, Slaves on Dope, the Snitches, Rise, Tricky Woo, the Dears, Stars, Patrick Watson, and the list goes on.
Ross formed a band called Bite in the early '90s, with a crew of female friends she met at Bifteck.
Moss was a regular before she started waitressing there in 1995.
'It was the kind of place where you go and you know 100 people — like, everyone in the bar,' she said.
The first time I ever met Nick Farkas, now vice-president of concerts and events at Montreal's main concert promoter, Evenko, was at Bifteck.
Moss was a photography student and freelance photographer for Hour magazine and the Mirror at the time. She is now a concert photographer for Evenko.
Ross began working with Farkas, Dan Webster and Paget Williams in the early '90s at their former company, indie-rock promoter Greenland. She then became a partner in the business after Farkas's departure until it was sold in 2021.
'It's crazy how this (place) is ground zero for so many things,' said Ross, who kept a weekly shift at Bifteck up until 2016. (Moss held on to one day a week until 2011.) 'People talk about halcyon days, and it seems corny but it really was special.'