So I had to smell it the whole entire time and then stay for three more extra hours.” I didn’t see it a customer came and told us, ‘I just seen shit all over the toilet, and I threw up on it.’ Of course, nobody wanted to clean it up and I was the closing guy, so I had to clean it up. “I’ve seen some things I don’t really want to say because-I don’t know-but I’ve seen a guy go in the bathroom and shat all over the toilet. It’s a little spicy, it’s delicious, it goes down great.” It’s got tequila, lime juice and there’s another ingredient in there. The outside looks so not what it is, but when you come inside, it’s just like, ‘Ahhh.’ You have to have a seat to sit down it’s not a place where you can just stand around and be behind someone. When people come up and they’ve never been here, I always describe it as Alice in Wonderland. didn’t have the shoes on but he had the suspenders, the hair, makeup and everything.” It was on a Friday night in October about three years ago. Somebody just had a clown outfit, came in, and we didn’t let him in ’cause he was a little tipsy, but it wasn’t even Halloween. “Wicker Park, you get a lot of crazy people walking up and down. What is the weirdest thing you’ve seen at the door? Right now I’m diggin’ the Moscow Mules with the Ketel One mint-cucumber.” “It used to be Jameson and ginger beer with a little lime. And it’s dope to see the room fill up with different people and everybody gets along.” Whatever walk of life you come from, we cater to that. We cater to everybody: the trans community, the gay community, the backpackers, the hipsters. You can come on the weekend, and we turn into an actual club, without having to dress up.
You can come on a Wednesday and hear rock bands. You can come on a Tuesday and get a tattoo party.
You can come to East Room on a Monday and get all vinyl. But I like the name, ’cause my grandmother gave it to me.” She was with a friend, and she was like, ‘Hey Fatty, I want to get in,’ and I’m like, ‘Come on in, I know you from this bar.’ The lady that she was with heard her call me my name and she was like, ‘That was rude, why would you insult him like that? And he let you in?!’ My name kind of brings that out of people.
A bartender, she came and she wanted to skip the line. “The weirdest thing for me is when the bartender sends someone to the door-one of their friends-and they be like, ‘Just ask for Fatty,’ and I see them and they’re like, ‘I’m not calling this guy that.’ I had that experience the other day. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen at the door? We asked each of them to tell us their craziest stories, go-to post-shift drink and what they love about their job. Closer to the lake we spoke with Darryl Rowe of Kingston Mines, a long-running Lincoln Park blues club beloved by tourists, college students and diehard fans. With just room for three, we started with Kevin Johnson of The Violet Hour, the relaxed, debonair Wicker Park cocktail bar that helped guide some locals away from Old Style and shots of Malört and “ put the cocktail on a pedestal, for better or worse.” Further north, Fatty keeps an eye on the door at East Room, a Logan Square speakeasy that hosts relaxed, all-vinyl DJ nights, concerts by upstart garage bands and hip-hop shows that Chance the Rapper has occasionally popped in on. And Chicago offers more than a few characters.
PUNCH’s new “A Night at the Door” series explores what these gatekeepers experience nightly in cities across the country. The men and women posted up around the entryways to the city’s speakeasies, lounges and nightclubs are as much a part of a watering hole’s lifeblood as the ambiance, menu or the regular you see sitting at the far end of the bar, nursing a single can of Hamm’s for hours. They are also often the most overlooked folks on the payroll, despite the fact that they act as the eyes and ears of the evening: clocking what people are doing, how they’re acting, taking stock of the ebb and flow. Every part of the city has at least one place that sums up what the neighborhood is like.Īnd if you want to know the character of the bar, all you have to do is present your ID at the door. It doesn’t matter the neighborhood: from hidden dives in Pilsen or the Ukrainian Village, to cocktail spots in Logan Square or a beer on a sunny afternoon at whatever the White Sox stadium is called this year, locals don’t need much of an excuse. Anybody who has spent even a little time in Chicago can confirm it’s a drinking town.