Four friends who liked beer and cooking opened La Courtepointe, and the place still runs on that logic. Nothing on the menu is trying to impress anyone but the room. House pogos built on Gaspor sausage. Fried chicken under kimchi sauce with a fennel salad alongside. The taps turn over through Quebec microbreweries and whatever collaborations they've got going, so the board rarely reads the same way twice, and the wine and cocktail lists hold up their end without making a production of it. It has become the sort of corner people end up at rather than plan for, which is the highest compliment a neighbourhood bar can be paid.

The records start in the 1940s and move forward from there, which gives the room more range than most bars built around a turntable. Le Record is laid out for it: a U-shaped bar with the stacks racked behind, bulb pendants handling the light, the whole thing pitched between speakeasy and listening room. The cocktails take their names off the shelf, so you order a Purple Rain or a Sinatra Sour or a Wild Horses and nobody comments. Food is deliberately minor, popcorn and olives and three kinds of pizza, because the point is staying for another side.

Cocktails, wine, beer, and oysters is a lot for one bar to claim, and Huis Clos gets away with it by refusing to be precious about any of them. Ten taps rotate through local breweries. Geneviève Morneau built the wine list. The cocktails split between classics and things that are clearly enjoying themselves. The room runs bright and loose rather than dim and considered, with a foosball table, a disco ball, and a light-up marquee behind the bar spelling out the specials. Order a dozen oysters and a beer, and see how the evening files that combination.

Loretta calls itself a bar-cantine, which is the tell. Wine is the focus, but the prices sit below what that usually implies, and the food menu leans closer to a dive than to anything you'd expect beside a list like this. The non-alcoholic options run as long as the beer and cocktail menu, which is rarer than it should be and says plenty about who the room is built for. What Loretta pulls off is the thing most wine bars claim and few manage: it looks good, it knows what it's pouring, and nobody acts like you need to have earned the right to sit down.

EtOH brews on Saint-Denis and keeps its pints under $9, which in this city now counts as a position. The range runs IPAs, stouts, blonde ales, and sours, and the experimental end doesn't stay theoretical: a sour built on mango, pineapple, and passion fruit, or a German-style wheat brown called Bananarama. The taps turn over often enough that regulars arrive expecting to be surprised. The food is the sensible kind, charcuterie and cheese, terrine, sandwiches, salads, all of it there to keep you drinking rather than to compete for the attention.

Cash only, which tells you most of it. Bar 8004 opens at 11 in the morning and runs to 3 a.m., a stretch that only makes sense if a bar is genuinely for the people who live around it. There are televisions with whatever game is on, pints priced the way they used to be, a pool table, and slots for anyone inclined that way. The regulars are the room, and they were here first. Sixteen hours a day is a long time to hold a corner of a neighbourhood together, and this is one of the last places in Villeray still doing it.

Tabac runs as a café through lunch and brunch, then changes register once the light goes. Wine is the reason to come after that, an extensive list covering reds, whites, rosés, and oranges without anyone needing to grant you permission. The house cocktails go the other direction entirely, bright and fruit-forward, with lychee, basil, melon, peach, and pineapple turning up across the menu. It's a useful room to know precisely because it works at both ends of the day, which not many places in the neighbourhood can say.

The cocktail list at Chez Josie names its drinks after women worth naming, Cleopatra and Frida Kahlo and Rosa Parks among them, and the conceit holds because the drinks are good enough not to need it. Behind those sit the classics, a few drafts, and reds, whites, and sparkling by the glass. The kitchen gets the same attention as the bar, which is what separates a buvette from a place that merely puts out snacks: tuna ceviche, beef tartare, lasagna bites built to be picked at across a second glass.

The garage bones are still visible at Polari, concrete underfoot and brick along the walls, with art hung well enough that the room reads considered rather than unfinished. Keaton Ritchie built the wine list, which runs on natural and organic bottles from small producers, some local and some a long way from here. There's local beer and a short cocktail list for anyone not drinking wine, and a small-plates menu that moves with the season. It's the most styled room on this list, and it still manages not to make you feel underdressed.