Entering Convenience is like teleporting to a bygone era. This bar and restaurant caters to the nostalgic amongst us and lovers of all things retro with an innovative food and cocktail menu. Equipped with all the fittings of a corner store of your childhood, this Queen West part restaurant part convenience store will fill not only fill your hunger for food, but your hunger for the past.
A two-part concept, first a front corner store area that opens at 9 a.m. every day, and then a back resto-bar that opens at 5 p.m. It’s the attention to detail that makes the ambiance of this particular hangout. Equipped with nostalgic games and clever elements throughout like Pac-Man, which costs just 25 cents a play and TVs leading down to the bathrooms playing security footage of failed store robberies. The convenience store area is like a more curated fantasy version of your local corner shop, with some of the same items you’d normally find in any store like $2 candies and rolling papers.
And of course, our favourite thing about this UB venue is the downstairs on your way to the washrooms – there’s a section lit in hot pink equipped with a couple old phones (you know, the kind actually attached to the wall) with the retro phrase “party line” printed above them on the wall creating the perfect Instagram shot. They actually play recordings, meant to mimic old teen chat lines.
Community Agency designed the entire space from square one. Including a hand-stitched art reading “GAME OVER” took five days to complete.
