Taverne Midway sits on the corner of Saint-Laurent and Sainte-Catherine at 1219 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, and it has been pouring beer there since 1927. It is not a sports bar in the wings-and-flat-screens sense. It is an old Montreal tavern that happens to put the Canadiens on the screens, and on a hockey night that is the better version of the thing.
The Midway has stood through the Great Depression, Prohibition's Canadian tail, and more than twenty Stanley Cup parades down the street, per The Main's neighborhood writeup. The room kept its bones while the Quartier des spectacles rebuilt itself around the corner. That continuity is the draw: you are drinking in the same room generations of Montrealers watched the Habs in.
The room reads as a working tavern, not a renovation. Long bar, worn tables, the kind of low light that forgives a long night, and a draft wall that runs past 20 taps when the rotation is full. The crowd is a mix of Plateau regulars, students off the Saint-Laurent strip, and old-timers who have had the same stool for years. On a Canadiens night the screens go on and the room turns into a hockey crowd without anyone having to announce it.
What to order is a cold draft off the rotating wall, which leans toward Quebec breweries, and you pick by asking the bartender what just went on. The food is tavern-honest rather than a menu to study. Pricing holds at $$, with the kind of draft prices that explain why the place has kept its regulars through every wave of gentrification on the boulevard.
Who it is for: the hockey fan who wants history with the game, the beer drinker who values a deep draft list over a cocktail program, and anyone tired of sports bars that feel built last year. It is a tavern first and a sports room on demand. For the wider field, our ranked guide to the best sports bars in Montreal places the Midway among the city's most characterful game-night rooms.
Best time to go is a Canadiens home night, when the screens carry the Habs and the corner fills with a hockey crowd, or a quiet weekday afternoon when you can actually study the draft wall. It sits on top of the Saint-Laurent Metro, so getting home is never the problem. For a livelier downtown alternative, McKibbin's Irish Pub covers the pub-grub end, and our guide to Montreal's best after-work bars maps the surrounding streets.
What keeps the Midway worth the stop is that it never had to reinvent itself to stay relevant. It opened as a corner tavern in 1927 and it still runs as one, which in a Montreal that tears down and rebuilds constantly is its own kind of achievement. Pour a draft, find a screen on a Habs night, and you are part of a continuity almost a century deep. Our full Montreal guide and the national sports bars index round it out.
The Midway also leans into the late hours that most Montreal kitchens give up on, staying open well past midnight when the downtown crowd needs somewhere to land. Playoff runs turn the corner into a genuine hockey shrine, the screens packed and the draft wall working overtime. It is the rare room where a tourist and a fifty-year regular end up at the same rail watching the same game. The draft wall is the reason beer drinkers keep the Midway on their list, with the rotation deep enough that a regular can come back weekly and find something new on tap. Nearly a hundred years in, the formula has not changed and does not need to, and that is exactly why it still draws a crowd the night the Habs play.
Sources: Taverne Midway (official) · The Main · Yelp (updated April 2026) · Facebook
