Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

The last light of Montreal's Red Light District refuses to go out. Cafe Cleopatra at 1230 Boulevard Saint-Laurent occupies a building from 1895 that has housed show bars almost continuously since it went up - the Club Alhambra, the Sailor's Dining Room, the Cafe Parthenon, the Riviera Grill and the Cafe Canasta all preceded the current name, adopted in 1976 - making the address arguably the longest-operating show bar in the city. It stands on the Lower Main, the stretch of Saint-Laurent that from the 1920s made Montreal North America's nighttime playground, where Frank Sinatra played Chez Paree and stripper Lili St-Cyr performed with a stuffed parrot under gaudy neon. Greek immigrant Johnny Zoumboulakis, who arrived in Montreal in 1966 and started at the club as a barman in 1976, bought the establishment in 1985 and crystallised its two-floor identity: a ground-level strip club with go-go dancers, and an upstairs cabaret hosting drag queens, trans performers, burlesque revues, fetish nights, comedy and even naked karaoke - a rare room drawing straight and queer audiences alike, several blocks west of the Gay Village. Festivals including Pop Montreal and M pour Montreal book its stage for the atmosphere no purpose-built venue can fake. The venue's defining battle came when the city's Quartier des spectacles redevelopment targeted the block: expropriation proceedings opened in 2009 to make way for a twelve-storey office tower, and every neighbouring business sold out and fell to demolition. Zoumboulakis fought on heritage grounds - "I'm trying to preserve history," he told the Globe and Mail - and in March 2011 the city abandoned the expropriation, forcing the Carre Saint-Laurent project to build around the defiant little cabaret. Cafe Cleopatra thus survives as a working museum of the wicked Main: the strip club downstairs, the sequins and satire upstairs, and a century of Montreal after dark soaked into the 1895 walls - a landmark that won its landmark status the hard way.