Our Story
Created by hospitality developer Daniel Alonso (Black Bull, Fulton Market Kitchen), Bordel is a hidden, craft-cocktail bar distinguished by eclectic interiors and a weekly theater of varieties featuring a rotating cast of jazz musicians, burlesque performers, magicians, flamenco artists, palm readers and more.
To create a local bar with a focus on elevating the craft of the cocktail Daniel teamed up with Bar Manager Marissa Huth and beverage mavens Brian Sturgulewski, Alex Renshaw and Clint Rogers of The Dogma Group. Their hard work and creativity resulted in one of Chicago's favorite new speakeasies.
Our current cocktail menu was inspired by the novel, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM. This hard-hitting novel published in 1949 told the story of a low-level hustler and card dealer, Frankie Machine, who returns home from World War II to one of the toughest neighborhoods in the country: Chicago’s Division Street.
Dreaming of someday becoming a professional drummer, Frankie is saddled by a crippled & controlling wife, Zosh, and a secret “thirty-five pound monkey” on his back in the form of a morphine addiction.
This tragic story was the public’s first peek inside the neon wilderness of Wicker Park. And so honest and poignant was the telling that the novel was awarded the first National Book Award in 1950.
While the neighborhood has changed, the ghosts of hustlers, thugs, drunks, and addicts linger. This winter, BORDEL pays homage to our neighborhood’s past. All cocktails on this menu are inspired by the novel that showed the world the beauty and flaws of our neighborhood and city. A town that the author Nelson Algren rightly said “is an October sort of city even in the spring.”
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