Cocktails at Dominion Bar and Kitchen

Chinatown's apothecary bar where the cocktail menu is literally called Remedies and Cures.

A 25-seat Strathcona wine bar with an all-vinyl hi-fi setup and a Michelin Plate, because Tuesday needed an occasion.

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

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.

Minimal-intervention BC wine, lamb tartare, and a Gastown alley that does half the romantic heavy lifting.

A tiny Commercial Drive room built on Italian aperitivo culture, amaro walls, and booths sized for exactly two.

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

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

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

A shag-carpeted 1970s speakeasy hidden behind a fake accounting office, where the cocktails are far better than the decor suggests.

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

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.