The world may be moving at a bewildering pace, but anyone who ever set foot inside Bifteck will be relieved to know that nothing — and I mean nothing — has changed.

Officially called Bar Bifteck St-Laurent, Bifteck is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its ’90s heyday Thursday starting at 6 p.m. The place itself is approximately a decade older than that. It was reportedly a strip club back in the 1970s, then a steakhouse. Then at some point in the mid-’80s, it became a bar — nothing special, just a regular drinking hole with a couple of pool tables and cheap beer on a desolate and sometimes scary strip of St-Laurent. There was little to suggest it would become the epicentre of alt-rock cool just a few years later.

Nancy Ross was a 19-year-old McGill student in 1990, working as a cocktail waitress at Gibbys steakhouse in Old Montreal. On her way home to the Plateau, she would stop off at Bifteck because she knew the bartender, a Portuguese guy named Luis.

She was sitting at the bar a few days after quitting Gibbys when Luis offered her a job as a bartender.

“It was my hangout, so it was great,” Ross said. She is hosting Bifteck’s sort-of........

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