BC Wine and Craft Beer at Tap and Barrel South Surrey

Vancouver's first natural-wine bar, a tiny bare-bulb Kitsilano room built for organic pours, premium sake, and losing track of time.

The old Old Crow room on Front Street, now pouring cocktails named after star signs until eleven.

Follow the single red light behind a Main Street furniture shop down a graffiti stairwell into Vancouver's most satisfying open secret.

Float weightless in body-temperature saltwater side by side in W 4th's most serene, screen-free double room.

Enter through a Gastown pet psychic storefront; emerge in a velvet, candlelit tarot-bar that's theatrical without being embarrassing.

Live piano four nights a week at the Wedgewood Hotel, where the lamplight is warm and the reservations are not a thing.

A breezy beach-village room on Beecher Street, a short walk from the sand, pouring BC wine, cold drafts and frozen cocktails.

A proper old English pub hidden in a courtyard behind Marine Drive, one block up from Ambleside Beach, with the cheapest pints in West Vancouver and no pretension at all.

Dundarave's small Italian bar with the raised, flower-hedged patio, where one glass has a well-documented habit of turning into three hours.

A 1930s Shanghai parlour hidden behind a Chinatown dumpling shop's fridge door, accessed by code, reserved in advance.

Off the Moda Hotel lobby on Seymour: low-lit, Italian small plates, marble bar, and a daily 2-to-5 happy hour worth knowing about.

Dim light, a sake flight, and small plates you have to negotiate over, which is how a low-key izakaya date runs three hours.

Cloverdale's original craft beer house, pouring about 18 BC and Belgian drafts a block from the heritage main street.

A gloriously retro sunken circular bar a block off English Bay, where happy hour, low light, and the best free sunset in the city do all the work.