The friendly face of a Towers bartender. Franz Pechardo/The Griff.

Downtown Edmonton is full of places to grab a drink – which is the best for students around campus?

To judge the best bar around MacEwan, I need to establish criteria to rank them by. In building this criterion, I kept in mind the two primary functions of visiting a bar: getting drunk and talking to friends. I entered each bar thinking about how long it took me to get a drink and how much the atmosphere encouraged me to interact with those around me. I decided to visit three locations near MacEwan: First Round, Towers, and the Canadian Brewhouse. These three bars were the closest to MacEwan, so I figured they would be the ones most frequented by students and therefore most worth reviewing.

Canadian Brewhouse

Canadian Brewhouse is about a five-minute walk from Allard Hall, sharing a parking lot with Harvey’s (which, before someone tries to claim an article about it, is the best fast-food place near campus). When I walked in, I felt like I’d picked up 15 years, a divorce, and an obsession with sports that filled the void where my sons used to be. Everything inside was made of dark wood and illuminated by a select few lights, seemingly for the purpose of making whoever you were meeting there appear less ugly. On the walls were the names of football teams I felt I should recognize, and in each direction, a TV mounted on the wall showing either hockey or football. The service was fast, the beer sizes had American names (boo), but I felt relaxed. In one word: inoffensive. 

Towers

When I entered Towers, I felt that the collective maturity had shifted down by about three years. I don’t know whether it was the idea of beers before noon or the fact that I saw someone dealing speed, but Towers made me feel like I was watching a group of babies play with assault rifles in a sandbox. Maybe we should open a twin bar next to Towers and see what happens. 

First Round

Entering First Round was akin to what I imagine a war flashback to be like. Flash! Bang! Fuck! The lights in First Round weren’t bright, but the whole place was lit up by what I counted to be about 22 thirty-five-inch Connor McDavids on TV, steering across the ice and, like the Mona Lisa, keeping an eye on you no matter where you sat. For myself, this proved to be hugely distracting from the people I was there attempting to communicate with, as we were all too busy pondering if Connor McDavid and whoever he was playing against were fucking behind the scenes. From what I remember, service was slower than at Canadian Brewhouse, and to my utter disappointment, they were out of deep-fried cheese curds. I remember getting too drunk and having to walk home. Overall, unenjoyable. 

Verdict

Go to Canadian Brewhouse. You won’t get any speed, and you won’t get all angles of Connor McDavid’s ass, but you’ll leave feeling like you should during a night out: uninhibited.