12 Best Bars in Paradise Road and the East Side, Las Vegas

The Badlands saloon in Commercial Center is acknowledged to be Las Vegas's oldest surviving gay bar, a 24-hour haven for local gay cowboys and city-slickers alike. It's decorated with a mock-log-cabin facade and offers cubbyholes in which regulars can store their beer steins. After national exposure when Badlands was featured on the reality show Bar Rescue in 2021, it has expanded upon its cowboy theme to be more versatile, with weekly trivia, karaoke, and drag show nights.

This fun throwback is the brightest sign of a comeback for the faded Commercial Center (especially given what seems like the permanent disappearance of its most famous fixture, Lotus of Siam). This restaurant and club with a stylish retro vibe offers not just one, but two live entertainment venues: the larger showroom and the cozier Tavern Stage lounge. The roster embraces everything from classic-rock and Motown tribute bands to veteran Vegas crooners and jazz ensembles.

Call it a self-aware dive bar—the Double D sits a short walk between the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas and the Thomas & Mack Center and a long, long way from the upscale casino hotels. A sign inside says it nicely: "Shut Up and Drink." Delicious decadence prevails here 24 hours a day; no wonder it was a favorite of the late food celebrity Anthony Bourdain and anyone else adventurous enough to enjoy a bacon martini. While it has been impacted by outside forces—namely the downtown migration of college students and the boho crowd—not a thing has changed within: this deliberately downscale bar awash in cleverly obscene graffiti has everything from great local bands to a truly eclectic jukebox. Our advice: go late, choke back the cigarette smoke, and try the (fabled) Ass Juice cocktail. A sister property, the Triple Down, has opened just west of the Strip as part of the Punk Rock Museum.

One of Las Vegas's longest-running gay bars closed its longtime home on West Charleston Boulevard in late 2022 so that it could move to the East Side, in what's become an expanded area of Las Vegas's gay district along Twain Avenue, right next door to another alternative favorite, Fun Hog Ranch.

If this club isn't the way you remember it, it's not the drinks affecting your memory. Gipsy occupies the same footprint as the legendary gay club of yore, but that's about it. A $4 million reconstruction created a new indoor-outdoor club and sushi bar on the same property. The new building displays a considerably more upscale vibe, including state-of-the-art lighting, a video wall, and floral-themed touches evoking the Parisian showgirl costumes of classic Vegas. It shares the same ownership as nearby Piranha, so Gipsy has honed in on drag performances—including a Saturday drag brunch—while Piranha is more the wild dance club Gipsy was back in the day.

An amazing remnant of classic Vegas that almost faded away before being reborn in the 2010s, this club-restaurant has a front lounge that offers live cocktail entertainment Wednesday through Sunday and a ballroom that features ticketed shows. The entertainment is mostly tributes, usually to one or more members of the Rat Pack but sometimes to other Vegas stars such as Tom Jones. The performers are often Legends in Concert alumni or singers who work on cruise ships. Most of the shows have a dinner or buffet option.

A lot of people ask, "Where do Las Vegas entertainers hang out and perform for one another?" One of the best and most consistent answers is found in this appealing and easily accessed lounge at The Tuscany (an attractive, convention-oriented hotel that is otherwise unremarkable). Kenny Davidson's Celebrity Piano Bar is a Friday-night fixture for local performers, and other nights feature a rotating roster of singers as early as 7 or 7:30 pm, making it a true low-key alternative to the dance clubs.

Revelers pack this gorgeous spot every night of the week, and with good reason, given that it's the main gay dance club in town. Each night offers a main-stage drag, acrobatic, or dance performance. Weekends bring ticketed performances from the likes of RuPaul's Drag Race contestants, but weeknights usually have no cover charge. Although the dance floor at Piranha is legendary, find your way through the labyrinth of rooms to the spacious, fireplace-ringed open-air patio out back. 

The lone topless club in the convention corridor is smaller than the splashy ones to the west, but it has long benefited from its location: across the street and literally within stumbling distance of Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. Once notorious as Club Paradise—and in more recent years known as Centerfolds—its new name in the summer of 2025 signaled a twist in the format, to see if two favorite guy things (sports bars and strip clubs) can be combined into one. The dancers have to vie for attention with 10 big-screen TVs and a 20-foot video wall, and plans called for more sports-viewing in the daytime and early evenings before the dancers take center stage.

This comfortable venue is versatile enough to be closed off for ticketed concerts or opened up to host free lounge acts and casino promotional events. Sight lines are great, and it's really the only game on this side of town for a diverse range of local and mid-level concerts that range from rock to country and just about everything in between.

The concert hall long known as The Joint is now just The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. During the makeover, the 4,000-plus capacity venue was spruced up with new seating and some changes, like moving a VIP area to the ground-floor level. Upgrades were welcome, as the venue was always better known for the big names it hosted than for the room itself, a big box, which jams seated fans into folding chairs and puts the versatility of its seating configurations ahead of comfort, aesthetics, or design. While leaving the biggest names (and highest ticket prices) to the Strip, The Theater has booked a steady flow of acts, from hard rockers Danzig and Meshuggah to Latin acts such as Alejandra Guzman and stand-up comedians such as Ali Siddiq.

You get two kinds of retro-hip nostalgia at Casa Di Amore, a durable Italian restaurant. Inside, vintage photos of Las Vegas line the walls where a live pianist often entertains diners. Except for the limited bar seating, the indoor area is primarily for those with dinner reservations. Out back, however, the open-air Tiki Di Amore is more for the walk-up crowd of those in shorts and flip-flops, with a separate menu of bar food, cocktails such as The Pain Killer or Dark & Stormy, and often live bands amid the kitschy bamboo and thatched-roof surroundings. (The tiki bar is only open from Friday to Sunday, and only in the warmer months.)