Dundas Video

Really cool place. Good drinks, friendly staff… not to mention killer vintage video game selection.
I have gone to Dundas Video a couple of times now, and have yet to be disappointed. Every time I am there, I have a great time. The bar has a cozy feel, chill vibes and great music.
Definitely worth checking out.

Love this place, Chris is the best bartender in the city and knows how to bring good times together. I can honestly say I have never had a bad time here, the summer just is never complete unless a visit is made to Dundas video.

This is a great place to chill with friends, listen to old school hip hop, drink tall boys and play video games from the 90’s. It would also make for a fun date!

Dundas Video was a spur-​of-​the-​moment destination. A friend of mine knew the owner of the bar and asked if I wanted to check it out. He told me there were a number of retro games stationed all throughout the bar and I figured it was worth looking into.
When we arrived, I was pleasantly surprised at the atmosphere. A small, but cozy dive that had, as my friend promised, retro video game stations dispersed all throughout the bar. There was a SNES, NES, Genesis, N64, a duck-​hunt station and an arcade machine with 500 games loaded into it. I had to do a double-​take to realize this was a bar and not an arcade, but if you recorded a video in here and applied a VHS filter on it, it would certainly look like it was filmed in the early 90s.
The owner treated us to a beer and a glass full of quarters to enjoy playing some games on the arcade machine, which we happily did. Although, it was interesting to note that the machine had games loaded that were perhaps not even arcade games to begin with. My friend and I struggled with a few of them to accept the coin for player 2 to begin playing. It undoubtedly ate a few quarters but considering we spent none to begin with, this really wasn’t a problem. For actual paying customers though, this machine may best be approached with caution.
I noticed a large menu on the wall that listed nothing but video game titles. For a moment, I thought that all the drinks in the bar were named after video games. On a second glance, however, I realized that they were literally the entire catalogue of games available to play. My friend and I requested Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES, and the bartender opened a drawer behind him and pulled out a NES cart. He slid the NES and TV towards us, and before we knew it, we were jamming to some Mario Bros 3 on a CRT display while downing a beer. The nostalgia was overwhelming.
The basement was dedicated to the bathrooms but even so, it maintained the design motif. There was a lobby of sorts downstairs that separated the men and women’s bathroom. In it there was another CRT set laying plainly on a table. A VCR with a cassette of Back to the Future was sitting next to it just waiting for someone to hit play. I thought it was rather funny. I can’t imagine anyone stationing themselves between two bathrooms to watch Back to the Future. In the main area there was a projection screen showing Ghostbusters, while a DJ spun some laid back electronic music.
The crowd was, to my expectation, a rather hipster showing. The sorts of folks you might see doing school work in a local coffee shop. Not that this was a bad thing by any means, it’s just the sort of crowd this place would undoubtedly gather.
All in all, fantastic atmosphere, fantastic premise, worth seeing just to relive some 90s nostalgia alone. Highly recommended.

What happens when you take a mediocre bar like Magpie, splash some blue paint on the walls and give it a rec room theme of vintage video games, push some tables off to the side to make room for dancing, add some of the best dance floor DJs you’ll hear anywhere and then rename the place ‘Dundas Video’? You get a helluva good place to spend a Saturday night!
The staff is pleasant and unobtrusive, (and that’s great for bouncers) the cocktails look interesting, and the canned beer selection is compelling with the best ones knocked off the chalkboard list as the night wears on. I went to see my friend John O. and his band play to a packed room. The stage was pushed into the back corner and at eye level so while not ideal, makes dancing to a live show much more exhilarating. Behind the stage there was a movie playing from a projector, Cool World (1992) a stellar classic ‘A comic strip vamp seeks to seduce her cartoonist creator in order to cross over into the real world.’ It suited the 90s theme of video games set up to reach out to patrons with their bubble screens and dancing chunky graphics. The basement bathrooms had a similar fun theme. Check this gem out in the burgeoning strip of Dundas just west of Bathurst.

One of the friendliest bartenders I have met recently. We traded notes about music and he recommended some local Toronto musicians that I really enjoyed. This was a relaxed bar that was perfect to end my night in Toronto.

I went to a friends birthday and the place is pretty cool. They have a great selection of beer and cocktails at the bar and the servers are fast a friendly. They cherry on top here is the fact that they have a ton of vintage video games all around the bar. They have everything from NES to super NES to game gear with a ton of games for you to play. The issue I had was that it was really hot inside and they didn’t open the doors in the front to get air to circulate through the bar.