Home and Away in Calgary and Edmonton: the sports bar's story

Home and Away on 17th Ave SW, 2015 to 2019

Home and Away opened in 2015 at 1331 17th Ave SW, on the stretch of 17th Avenue that Calgary hockey fans had long treated as their main street. The year is on record; the month is not, and no published account gives an opening date.

Daily Hive later reported that the bar operated at that 17th Ave SW address for four years before shutting in June 2019. Those four years put it on the strip that had carried the name Red Mile since the Flames' playoff run of 2004, when crowds took over the avenue after each win and the street became the city's default place to celebrate.

For a bar whose whole idea was mixing rival fans, that was a loud street to start on.

A Calgary sports bar that welcomed the other team

The idea was in the name. Most sports bars in Calgary pick a side, and on a Flames night that side is red. The bar set out to be the room where the visiting fan got a seat and a fair hearing too, whether that meant Oilers blue on a big night or the colours of a team from another sport entirely.

The Globe and Mail summed it up in a May 2025 profile: "Since 2015, Home and Away has invited fans of all sports and teams." The same piece noted that the bar had moved to its later address in 2019.

In a province where the Battle of Alberta can still set the mood in an office the next morning, that policy was braver than it sounds. An Oilers fan cheering a goal in a Calgary bar is usually a short experiment. At Home and Away it was the point, and regulars on both sides seemed to enjoy the friction more than they would admit.

From 17th Ave to Victoria Park in November 2019

The gap between the two Calgary rooms lasted about five months. CTV News Calgary reported on 21 November 2019 that the bar was reopening that weekend on 1st Street SW, having moved from 17th Avenue SW.

The new room sat in Victoria Park, closer to the Saddledome than the old address had been. For anyone heading to a Flames game on foot, that changed the evening: a pint, a plate and then a walk to the arena, with no cab ride across the Beltline at the end of it. The streets around it are covered in more detail in the notes on bars in the Beltline, 17th Ave and Victoria Park, and the walk itself in the Saddledome visitor notes.

Moving a sports bar is harder than moving most businesses. The screens, the sightlines and the regulars all have to make the trip, and a bar that loses its corner for five months has to hope people remember where it went.

It was also a bigger building, and the bigger building came with a basement.

The Shuffle Club in the Victoria Park basement

Downstairs ran at a different pace from the screens upstairs. The Shuffle Club took the basement level of the 1st Street SW building, a downstairs room that Curiocity reported in November 2021 opened on weekends.

When Curiocity wrote about the place on 30 November 2021, it presented the building as a two-in-one bar and said the Shuffle Club "only rocks on the weekends". No opening date for the Shuffle Club appears in print, so that November 2021 piece is the earliest public mention of the room rather than its birthday.

The space had a past before shuffleboard. According to the same article, the basement was once The Depression, a 1960s coffee house, and at another point Club Carousel, which Curiocity described as Calgary's first-ever gay bar. Few sports bars in the city could point to a cellar with that kind of story under the floorboards.

Shuffleboard suits a sports bar better than it looks on paper. A game takes a few minutes, you can play with a drink in one hand, and nobody needs any talent to enjoy losing to a friend.

Home and Away in Edmonton, 2022 to March 2025

In 2022 the bar opened a second location in Edmonton, on 104 Street NW downtown. Taking a Calgary-born, welcome-the-rival sports bar into the heart of Oilers country was a braver move than it might have looked from the south. Downtown Edmonton was changing fast in those years, with Rogers Place open since 2016 and the Ice District filling in around it, so any new sports bar there was up against big, newer rooms on game nights.

The Edmonton room closed in March 2025, after roughly three years. That was a shorter run than either Calgary address managed, and it left the name in one city again for its final year.

Game nights in that part of town have plenty of other options; the sports bars in Edmonton, sorted by neighbourhood, start with the streets around Rogers Place.

Last call in Calgary, 5 April 2026

Home and Away closed in Calgary on 5 April 2026, after more than six years in Victoria Park and about eleven years in the city altogether. With that, both locations were gone: Edmonton a little over a year earlier, Calgary that spring.

People still look up the menu, the hours and the reviews. None of it applies any more. There is no current address, no booking line and no kitchen, and the old Calgary and Edmonton addresses belong in a history of the bar, not in plans for a Saturday night.

That is a plain ending, and it deserves a plain sentence: the bar is closed.

Where Calgary fans of both teams watch the game now

The welcome-everyone idea did not disappear with the bar so much as scatter. Rooms on and around 17th Avenue still fill on Flames nights, and some of them are kinder to a blue jersey than others. The list of places to watch the Flames is the place to start, and the wider list of sports bars in Calgary covers downtown, the Beltline and Victoria Park.

What none of them offers is a direct replacement for a shuffleboard room in a basement that once held a 1960s coffee house.