Iconic dive bar and concert venue in Toronto gets new look and mascot

Toronto’s newest venue is all about good times, great music, and celebrating a city that never quits.

Dina’s Tavern, a new venue featuring the coolest mascot you’ll ever see (a rat in sunglasses smoking), wears its history on its sleeve, as it is situated in the former Silver Dollar Room, a famous venue that closed its doors in 2017.

Now a month into operations, Dina’s, which has designed a cocktail menu, programming schedule, and aesthetic mirroring its rough-and-tumble predecessor, is seeing massive success.

“It presented itself as a crazy opportunity to get access to this iconic and historic site, and once we got to see it with our own eyes, we realized just how amazing the layout was, and we all had this collective vision of a 70s aesthetic,” Nickie Minshall, one of the owners at Dina’s, told yourcitywithIN.com

Minshall, alongside co-owners Tasha Potter and Jesse Borg, stumbled into acquiring the space last December.

[Barside at Dina’s. Photo courtesy of Nickie Minshall]

The three of them, with backgrounds in live music and operational duties at west Toronto late-night institutions Bangarang and Track & Field, pounced at the chance to give the city back something it was missing when presented with the opportunity.

“We weren’t initially looking to do this, but when it was brought to us, we all realized it was kind of crazy that we had never thought of opening a live music venue. Like, we have been involved with live music all our lives — it’s hilarious that it kind of took someone to make us do it,” says Borg.

Dina’s — broken down to its base components — is a throwback to a Toronto often only seen in photographs.

However, instead of leaning into the kitsch of the era, the team behind it opted to incorporate as much of the old Silver Dollar’s character into the space as possible.

[The old Silver Dollar sign outside Dina’s Tavern. Photo courtesy of Nickie Minshall]

The result is a seemingly lived-in bar designed from the ground up with vintage lighting, paneling, and decor, all sourced, built, and curated in less than a year between acquiring keys and opening to the public.

“We were running to vintage stores and getting mirrors and lights, we were going through our old records and bringing those in. We brought in weird little trinkets we had lying around our homes from the era, all to make it have a genuine feel to it,” says Minshall.

It didn’t take long for word to spread about Dina’s mission to resurrect the old Silver Dollar, and what was once a task for only Minshall, Potter, and Borg quickly became a group project for the entire Toronto nightlife community.

Familiar bar staff, musical talent, and technicians quickly entered the fold leading up to Dina’s launch, giving what was once a ‘Hail Mary’ play to get a space open in more or less nine months, the best fighting odds a Toronto venue has seen in years.

“We have been incredibly lucky along the way; everything has been so serendipitous, mainly because we have gotten to work with a lot of people we know and respect, in just about every way you can imagine,” says Potter.

Once the stage was quite literally set, Dina’s launched in September to much fanfare, as it not only put a communal spotlight on its own history, but also that of the talent stepping up to perform every night.

[Grab a guitar pick at Dina’s. Photo courtesy of Nickie Minshall]

“If we wanted to have one key focus, I would say that it is local talent. I think one of the struggles music venues in this city can get into is that if you are always booking out of the city with touring bands, it gets harder and harder to foster a local community,” says Borg.

As a result, kicking off the weekly schedule is ‘Jazz Rat Mondays,’ which then opens to swing dancing, DJ sets, barn-burning karaoke nights, and a rotating roster of local bands as the week goes on.

Beyond programming, earnest attempts to blend old and new — according to the team — have paid off, as, due to its centralized and campus-adjacent location (Spadina and College), Dina’s has already garnered a reputation as a multigenerational hotspot.

“You look around on a Friday night, and you can see this younger generation of bar goers, who are visibly 22 or 23, and you can tell they’re digging it and that it’s a new vibe for them. They probably don’t hear as much live music as they could in the city, because it is not the places that they’re encouraged to go to,” says Minshall.

As for throughlines as to why fans of the old Silver Dollar and the new generation find Dina’s more than just palatable, it likely boils down to its low barrier for entry, as there is little to no door charge most nights, and a drink menu that, while not as cheap as the 70s was, gets as close as it can get.

“In an homage to the piano bars of the 70s, there’s a martini menu, and they’re about as cheap as a martini can get in this city. We also took a bunch of dive bar classics and reimagined them, some for like 12 bucks,” says Borg.

[Getting ready to open at Dina’s. Photo courtesy of Nickie Minshall]

This focus on affordability trickles throughout most of Dina’s DNA, as any hot ticket nights are branded as the ‘Dina’s 10 Dollar Bill,’ where ten bucks is the most you’ll pay for a cover charge, as well as $10 martinis running alongside jazz programming on Mondays.

“We have people coming in and checking the space out, seeing the live band, sticking around for the DJ set after, only to then approach us and go, ‘Oh my god, I have to book my birthday party here,'” adds Potter.

Keeping the shine of its predecessor, as well as the scrappiness of its new stylish mascot (which is, in fact, the titular Dina), Dina’s Tavern is shooting to give a space for nighttime packrats of all varieties, for a few silver dollars less than most places in the city would demand.