Montreal Pool Room: Serving a city's hot dogs for over a century

How a Bulgarian immigrant's billiard hall became one of Montreal's most enduring institutions, from pimp steaks to late night eats infamy.

J.P. Karwacki

November 14, 2025- Read time: 7 min

The Montreal Pool Room, circa 1967 (colourized). | Photograph: Archives de la Ville de Montréal

There's a photograph hanging inside the Montreal Pool Room of a man purported to be Dako Filipov. Maybe it's Filipoff Dakov. The spelling changes depending on who's telling it. The basics, however, stay the same: a Bulgarian immigrant opened a billiard hall on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in 1912, started steaming hot dogs along the way, and created something that would outlast him by more than a century.

Official records show Filipov didn't get his first license until 1921. Maybe he was operating under the table for those nine years—it was the Main in the 1910s, after all, in a part of town where moral flexibility was part of the appeal. Either way, the Montreal Pool Room has been around long enough that the precise start date matters less than the fact it's still here at all.

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