The Alley

Cool venue.

My friends band was playing here so we made a night out of it.. showed up when an opener was playing and it was pretty packed.

The bar is a nice size, the bartenders are quick and friendly.

The place has a 21+ bar area and the performance area is all ages. Kind of hard to get used to, I forgot I couldn't cross a certain point a couple times, but the girl working was nice about it.

The sound was decent, the crowd was friendly, and there's lots of various seating in the bar area, with a pool table.

The only drawback is the single-person bathrooms... be prepared to wait in a line 8 deep for the ladies room!

I'm not from Nevada, so the indoor smoking is a negative, but can't hate on that for state laws. A friend (who is a smoker) had to go outside for fresh air himself, only we found all the other smokers lighting up themselves on the patio. Kind of funny.

My favorite place for live music in Reno. I am amazed at the talent they bring in to this small venue.  Drinks are average priced, sometimes the draft beer is warmer than I prefer. I stick to the PBR cans ,cheap and always cold.

I used to agree with the rest.... The Alley was the perfect place to go see a great punk rock show. My fiancee and I know a lot of musicians in the industry, especially in the punk scene, and we were stoked when we moved to Reno to find out that The Alley was the place to go for some of our favorite bands. We never name drop and rarely ask to be on guest lists, we hardly party (let alone go out), and we most definitely DON'T get into bar fights... so this night was a total bummer. Not only did some guy sucker-punch my fiancee in the face that night, leading to the ER until 3AM and stitches, the perpetrators were apparently buddies of security and/or the owner and were allowed to stay and watch the show while we were kicked out, and were later let go with no consequences after we waited for an hour outside for some sort of justification from security. The worst part was that after I finally called the cops (when we realized the establishment wasn't going to do anything about my fiancee's busted face) the two of us voluntarily took breathalyzers to document that my fiancee had 0.0% alcohol in his system in order to disprove the statement given by the guards and the owner of The Alley that my fiancee was "Drunk" and that he swung at a girl and that we "Instigated" the fight. Um, I'm sorry, what fight? Oh, you mean your buddies cheap-shotted us and then left scott-free? Yeah. We'll never be going back there. And we'll get the word out to friends about the unethical crap we endured on a night that we were out, like normal 30 year old adults, trying to have a good time.