Toronto's most welcoming neighbourhood bar — Farside fills its mismatched-furniture East Chinatown room with everyone: locals, regulars, first-timers, and visitors. VHS movie nights, trivia club, DJ Fridays, and a drink menu that goes from domestic pints to serious cocktails. Everyone is welcome here, and it shows.
Neighbourhood: East Chinatown / Dundas East · Address: 1376 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON · Hours: Mon–Fri 4pm–2am | Sat–Sun 2pm–2am
Why Visit
Farside feels like Toronto's living room—think cheap pints, strong cocktails, and a crowd that’s down for anything from VHS movies to late-night dancing. It’s a rare spot where regulars chat with first-timers and everyone feels immediately at home.
What Makes It Unique
Unlike most bars in Toronto, Farside is genuinely inclusive—no pretense, no judging, just a mash-up of people and personalities. The programming alone is wild: one night it’s '90s VHS marathons, the next it’s a raucous trivia club. Even the furniture doesn't match, which just adds to the charm.
Farside in East Chinatown on Dundas Street East is the platonic ideal of a Toronto neighbourhood bar — a place where the welcome is unconditional, the beer is cold and affordable, the music is carefully chosen without being precious about it, and the regulars are genuinely glad to see you whether you're a face they've known for years or someone who walked in for the first time. In a city where 'neighbourhood bar' often describes something that merely resembles community without achieving it, Farside has the real thing.
The interior aesthetic is an accumulation of character rather than a designed look — mismatched furniture, photographs and art on the walls, a visual texture that speaks to years of actual use rather than a decorator's vision of what a neighbourhood bar should look like. This matters because authenticity reads immediately in a bar environment, and the people who make a bar like Farside their local are precisely the people who can spot the difference between a genuinely unpretentious space and a commercial approximation of one.
The music programming at Farside is better than a bar of this type usually manages. The playlists and DJ nights lean toward indie, post-punk, classic soul and funk, and the various guitar-based and electronic adjacent sounds that share aesthetic sensibility without a clean genre label. It's music that enhances the social experience without demanding to be the centre of attention — a harder balance to strike than it appears.
The East Chinatown location is part of what makes Farside interesting. The Dundas East stretch between Parliament and Broadview has a particular working-class, multicultural character that the neighbourhood bar category serves naturally. The proximity to Leslieville to the east and Riverdale to the south means Farside draws from a broad swath of east Toronto communities, giving it a genuinely mixed demographic in an era when gentrification often produces stratified nightlife.