Can you believe the Avant-Garde Bar is 20?

a site of many literary events

Image description: glasses hanging from the ceiling. Alex Yugin, owner of Avant Garde Bar faces forward and smiles. Unidentified person in hat faces him with back to camera. Photo by Charles Earl taken in 2009.

In the Ottawan, a really great e-mail newsletter, I learned today that the Avant-Garde Bar is celebrating its twentieth year of existence. My first thoughts are twenty years? How can it be that long? Am I really that old?

The Avant-Garde Bar and Gift Shop (its full name) sits on the fringes of the Byward Market in Lower Town at 135 1/2 Besserer Street. It has a Russian ambiance, serving foods such as Siberian pelemi (Russian dumplings), Leningrad Ice Cream and vodka. There’s a giant screen above the bar that doesn’t show sports, or at least has never shown them when I’ve been there. Instead it shows old 90s videos. On its walls and available from its gift shop are old movie posters from experimental and documentary films, such as WITHOUT REVOLUTIONARY THEORY THERE CAN BE NO REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT [1927].

The atmosphere felt like a throw back to an earlier time even when the place opened in 2004.

When I first came to Ottawa in the eighties, the space was taken by a different cafe, the Steaming Bean. I went there in between classes in my program at the School of Translators and Interpreters at the University of Ottawa. It was the first Ottawa cafe I fell in love with for people watching, sitting at the counter by the window and watching the Lower Town traffic of homeless people and various eccentrics pass by. Or I would wander down to the back of the cafe, which had a bunch of couches and strangely, smashed mirrors glued onto the walls. I remember a green couch, bright yellow paint. It’s always been a place with lots of colour and odd design choices. The owner was a friendly and handsome fellow named Guy who I used to enjoy chatting (flirting) with.

I don’t think that cafe lasted much longer than my three years at U of O or I’d lost track of it when I moved out to Gloucester, the suburbs in the nineties. So I was happy to go back to that location for readings when the In/Words Reading Series from Carleton University began to hold their open mics there. The first In/Words readings I attended took place at the Ottawa Arts Court in 2003 under the helm of David Emery, but a while later they started to happen at the Avant-Garde and this is when the open mic series became a regular fixture of Ottawa’s literary community, attracting not only Carleton students but also Ottawa’s emerging and established poets and prose writers. In/Words moved from there to the Clocktower Pub in the Glebe later and was there for years before it fizzled, now replaced by the Carleton University Poetic Society which hosts open mics over at Haven Cafe in Old Ottawa South, closer to Carleton U.

I read at the open mic a lot. It started late and went on until late. The room was always really noisy. One time Jesus came in from the outside and stood at the open mic for a bit. Can’t remember what prophesies he spouted. The host at the time had to get him off stage eventually.

Other organizations have held events there. I remember one reading via the U of Ottawa English Department, a conference on post-modernism, Fred Wah coming up from BC. Most recently VERSeFest held its first reading of the 2024 festival there this past spring. It’s still not the most comfortable place for a reading with a narrow room but thanks to Alex, who seems to run everything on his own now, including the food and the bar and getting people not to crowd the space that leads from the bar into the room, the Avant-Garde continues to thrive. At least I hope it thrives.

When not hosting literary events, the Avant-Garde also has music. I am completelyy unfamiliar with the music scene in Ottawa but a glance at the AG’s Instagram account reveals dark techno indie rock, extreme metal, audio terror…so… the avant-garde is present in its music too.

So … the Avant-Garde Bar is twenty years old today. Let’s meet there sometime for vodka and memories.

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