Updated July 13th 2026
Posted January 1st 2025
Inside Hilton Lac-Leamy, Bacchus preserves a style of hospitality built around cigars and fine spirits.
Bacchus: Cigare & Sofa
3 boul du Casino, Gatineau, QC
Open 4PM – 12AM
If you live in Ottawa and smoke cigars, you’ve probably learned to settle. A backyard in summer. A jacuzzi in the fall. A heated porch in winter. Perhaps the occasional corporate box at some fundraiser. The capital has spent the last decade building a serious cocktail scene: clarified milk punches, hand-cut ice, the whole bit. But a proper cigar lounge? That you still have to cross the river for.
Bacchus sits inside the Hilton Lac-Leamy in Gatineau, and it doesn’t really fit the usual categories. It’s not a cocktail bar, not is it a whisky bar. It’s a cigar lounge, built around the slow business of pairing a good smoke with something to drink and letting the evening do what evenings do.
Finding the place is half the appeal. You walk through the Hilton’s main lobby, past the bright, slightly generic Conrad Lounge, until you see a small sign: “Bacchus: Sofa & Cigare”. Once inside the Bacchus Sofa Lounge, walk to the very end of the bar and push through a set of heavy wood doors, at which point the hotel finally disappears. The lights drop. The ceiling lowers. Leather, dark wood, and that unmistakable smell of tobacco that’s been sitting in a room for hours.
The design avoids the two traps most cigar lounges fall into: the Disneyland-Havana thing, and the English-gentlemen’s-club cosplay. No fake colonial flair, no brass, no stuffed-leather affectation. Just wood panelling, polished black stone, charcoal walls, and oversized wingback chairs that swallow you. It feels like a hotel bar at a price you can’t quite bring yourself to ask about.
The space splits three ways. The main Sofa Lounge holds around sixty people, faces Lac Leamy through big windows, and centres on a marble fireplace that actually earns its keep in February. Off to one side sits an eleven-seat bar, useful if you want a drink without committing to a chair for the night. Beyond that, through those heavy wood doors is the dedicated Cigar Lounge, which seats about thirty in chairs spaced far enough apart that your conversations remain private.
Even on a Saturday, the room stays quiet. Portraits of famous smokers line the walls. The humidors glow under their own lights. Music sits low enough that you can ignore it. Nobody rushes you. Absolute relaxation!
Most cocktail bars are designed for turnover: Order, drink, leave, repeat. Bacchus runs on a different clock. People nurse a single glass of cognac or rum for two or three hours while they work through a cigar. The furniture, the spacing, the way the staff leaves you alone, it all pushes you in that direction. You’re not being hurried anywhere.
The cigar program is the main event. Two climate-controlled humidors hold sixteen to twenty cigar boxes at any time, mixing the Cuban names everyone knows (Cohiba, Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, Partagás, H. Upmann) with rotating New World picks. It’s a small, deliberate selection. No encyclopedic case, no 200-stick wall. Just enough variety to cover light, medium, and full-bodied, with humidity you can verify.
You can actually see the hygrometers. They’re right there in the glass. And while you’re welcome to lean in and look, only staff touch the cigars. They pull your pick, clip it, and hand it over. You light it yourself.
One change worth noting: Bacchus stopped allowing outside cigars after the pandemic. It used to be a bring-your-own kind of place; now it’s not. You can still buy cutters, lighters, torches, and ashtrays at the bar area, but the smoke has to be theirs. It’s a policy shift, and it tells you what kind of place they want to be: a destination, not a rentable room.
The drinks are good, but they’re not the headline. The back bar runs deep on whisky, scotch, cognac, and rum, with bottles like Plantation XO and Rémy Martin XO on display where you can ask about them. Nobody here is trying to pass this off as a specialist whisky bar, which is honest. Pairing your cigar with a fine oaked spirit is the logical thing to do.
Service has been steady. Over 10 years of going back, and I haven’t had a bad experience. The team greets you, walks you to a table, prepares your cigar, and then mostly disappears. Close enough when you need them, gone when you don’t. Recommendations come when you ask. Newcomers get guided; regulars get left alone.
Cocktails play a supporting role, and Bacchus seems to know it. The list is short: six martinis, four house drinks, three zero-proof options. A few lean on Quebec producers: Gin du Jardin from Distillerie du Square, Alpha Tango‘s black raspberry gin, Artist in Residence coffee liqueur, Sortilège maple whisky. Drinks like the Clover Club and Espresso Martini are familiar comfort picks. The Érable Martini and Crimson pull in local flavour without going weird. Over the years, I’ve worked through the Litchitini, a Cuba Libre, a Margarita, a glass of red, scotch, rum, and cognac. Everything came out properly chilled or properly neat, no fuss, simple glassware, restrained garnish. Cocktails here are there to keep your hand busy while the cigar does its work.
If you want clarified milk punches or ambitious tasting flights, Ottawa has better options. That’s not a knock. Bacchus isn’t trying to win that race.
Food is light: nachos, beef tartare, charcuterie. I haven’t eaten here, but the menu reads like grazing food, which matches the pace.
Practical stuff: eleven minutes from downtown Ottawa, free parking year-round, free coat check by the bar. I’ve never needed a reservation. For a premium-feeling experience, that’s almost absurdly easy.
Bacchus doesn’t try to be the region’s most inventive cocktail bar. It doesn’t try to replicate a downtown night out. What it does is preserve a kind of hospitality that’s increasingly difficult to come by in Canada. For cigar smokers in Ottawa-Gatineau, there’s no substitute. For cocktail drinkers willing to broaden the definition of bar culture a little, it’s a reminder that not every good evening is measured in drinks ordered. Sometimes it’s measured in how little anyone reached for their phone.
Verdict
Bacchus is one of the National Capital Region’s most distinctive beverage destinations and the only cigar lounge in the area. The humidors are well-maintained, the service is professional, and the spirits list is well-curated. The cocktail program is intentionally conservative, and that’s fine. It does its job. Go elsewhere if you want cutting-edge mixology. Go to Bacchus if you want a real cigar, a real drink, and an evening that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is.
Good afternoon,
I am planning to pass by your establihment on Tuesday evening of April 15th 2025.
May I bring and enjoy my own cigars? I understand a fee might be charge if it is.
Or, is it not permitted?
Cheers!
Francis Guerin
Hi Francis,
As of 2020, Bacchus no longer allows guests to bring their own cigars. To smoke here, you will have to buy a cigar from the establishment.
Cheers!
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I use to visit Bacchus frequently before the pandemic. However, since then this has been my first visit in 5 years. Simply because as some other patrons have noted Bacchus management has used the pandemic as a means by which they hike up the cigar prices and made it so that’s the only cigar you can partake in should you wish to do so is the one sold at the lounge.
I am also a cigar snob and to be honest the cigar I like can be purchased at a more reasonable price online. This was not an issue before the pandemic but apparently despite everything going back to normal the management has seen fit to keep the pandemic operating procedures in place. Why I believe this is the management way of trying to regain some of their losses due to the pandemic. However, since I use to go to the cigar lounge once or twice a week before the pandemic. Who is really losing out by my lack of attendance.
Since I have only gone once in 5 years who’s losing out. I can do the math but so can everyone else. I have always had a drink or two when I brought my own cigar. This is once or twice a week and since I have not made any attempt to return with the exception of this special day. I believe the management have lost out on significant profits. I am also sure I am not the only one.
We cigar smoker should approach the management and voice our concerns. That we want to return to the pre-pandemic regulations. But if the new regulations are to keep the patrons safe & the servers safe then the cigar server should not be cutting or handling our cigars. This was my experience on my latest visit that the server not only picked up my cigar with his hand but proceeded to cut the cigar.
My suggestion is simply a return to the old rules would improve business and if needed impose a nominal cutting fee as some restaurants do when you are bringing your own wine.
However, the old regulations worked just fine prior to the pandemic. These same regulations should be adequate post pandemic and if you truly wish to safeguard the clientelle, and the staff then have the customers can take their cigar buts with them or throw them into a cigar disposal deposit upon completion of their evening.
But I truly believe that the management is using these post pandemic regulations to recoup their losses while their was a full blown pandemic for everyone to be worried about, but now there is no just justification. Therefore, a return pre-pandemic rules is warranted.
The lounge had become like a private club filled with regulars who spent a few dollars on drinks and sat there for hours smoking their own and each other’s cigars. I prefer it now. If you want to smoke your own sticks you can do it in your backyard.
Hello! I am looking to bring my partner for a surprise birthday weekend. I am looking for more information about this quote in your article: “…the Cigar Lounge is a world unto itself. Access requires permission from staff” How do I request access, specifically? Thanks!
Hell Andrea. Once you enter the Bacchus Bar, you will see two employees, usually tending the bar. You must tell any of these employees that you and your partner would like to go to the cigar lounge. The server/ bartender will then bring you both into the cigar lounge and offer you a seat.