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If you were anywhere near Granville Street on a Saturday night in the late 90s, you already know. You just followed the noise, the lineup, and the faint smell of cheap vodka until you ended up at JJ Rossy’s. Three floors of absolute mayhem where $2.20 got you a vodka lime and whatever was left of your dignity.

What Joey, Jimmy, and Dave Ross built at 1883 Granville went way beyond a bar. They built a religion. You’d hit Peddler’s for the Saturday matinee, stumble to The Palace on Brunswick, maybe end up at Brandy’s because the line at The Dome was wrapped around Argyle Street. That was the circuit.

And the music. The music was everything. This was the era when “No Diggity” by Blackstreet could silence an entire room and then bring it back to life in the same four bars. TLC owned every dance floor. The Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls were inescapable and nobody was apologizing for it. You’d hear Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” into Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” and the whole place would erupt. The DJs had a bottomless well of tracks that could keep a room moving until last call, and the best ones knew how to take you from a Boyz II Men slow jam into full blown Busta Rhymes chaos in three songs flat.

Then, one by one, the lights went out. JJ’s closed in the early 2000s. Peddler’s went with it. The Palace, Brandy’s, Scoundrel’s. All gone. The Dome survived, but the strip that made downtown Halifax the capital of East Coast nightlife got a lot quieter. The music kept living on playlists and in car stereos, but the rooms where it belonged started disappearing.

So it’s a little poetic that the energy has crossed the harbour.

DJ Jasko has been building something at Jacob’s Burrow, the cozy basement lounge tucked below the award winning Jacob’s Lounge on Portland Street in downtown Dartmouth. If you haven’t been down there, picture candlelit hardwood floors, moody blue lighting, and a bar that feels like it was built for late nights. It’s intimate in the best possible way, the kind of room where the music hits different because the walls are close enough to hold it in.

Jacobs Burrow, 106 Portland St

Every Saturday from 10 PM to 2 AM, Jasko transforms the place into a time machine, spinning 90s vs 2000s hits. We’re talking the full catalogue. The R&B that made you fall in love with someone across the bar. The hip hop that made you think you could actually dance. The pop anthems that entire rooms would scream word for word until their voices gave out. This is the playlist that soundtracked an entire generation’s best nights out, and hearing it in a dark room with a proper sound system is a completely different experience than scrolling through a Spotify throwback playlist in your kitchen.

“I grew up hearing stories about JJ’s and those Saturday nights downtown,” Jasko said. “When you look at the music from that time, it was a golden era. You had R&B, hip hop, pop, and dance all existing on the same playlist and nobody thought that was weird. A DJ could go from Lauryn Hill to Eminem to Britney Spears and the floor would stay packed. Try that today and people look at you like you’re confused. Back then it was just a Saturday night.”

The drinks, unfortunately, are no longer $2.20. Inflation came for us all, but at least the music is still free once you’re through the door. And Jasko says the crowd keeps crossing generations.

“I’ve had people tell me their parents told them to come check it out. That’s exactly what this music does. People danced to these songs at The Dome in 2001 and now a whole new crowd is dancing to them at Jacob’s Burrow in 2026. Same songs. Same energy. Different side of the harbour.”

Throwback Saturdays runs every Saturday night at Jacob’s Burrow, 106 Portland Street, Dartmouth. 10 PM to 2 AM. 19+.