Another Iconic Chicago Spot Is Gone. Wicker Park's Game Changing "The Violet Hour" Announced They Are Closing After 18 Years. Here's An Ode To One Of The Best Bars In America
Eater - The Violet Hour won’t reopen along Damen Avenue, ending an 18-year run. The news comes three weeks after owners at One Off Hospitality Group announced that the pioneering cocktail bar was closed indefinitely due to landlord negotiations over plumbing issues.
There were faint hopes that Violet Hour could reach an agreement with its landlords to complete what the bar described as “substantial” fixes. But that evaporated after “extensive efforts and negotiations” failed, according to a rep. The bar opened in 2007 at 1520 N. Damen Avenue. It had been closed for weeks and was forced to relocate a recent pop-up event hosting Portland, Oregon’s Scotch Lodge over the James Beard Awards weekend.
“The Violet Hour has remained an essential fixture in Wicker Park and a quiet icon on the national cocktail scene,” a portion of a statement from the bar reads. “From the artists who painted our ever-changing facade to the bartenders who opened their own award-winning bars, we’re proud of the role we played in sparking a cultural shift in how this city drinks and gathers.”
The statement also teased that this wasn’t “the end of The Violet Hour as a brand,” and that customers “may see us again somewhere down the line.”
Excuse me for getting sentimental about a craft cocktail bar closing, but this place means a great deal to a lot of Chicagoans.
After nearly two decades of whispered entrances, candlelit booths, and drinks that could silence a room, The Violet Hour is calling last call.
The bar that quietly changed how middle America drank has announced its closing, and it feels like more than just the loss of a local cocktail haunt. It feels like the end of a movement.
If you're anything like me, and you didn't have more than $10 in your pocket at any given time your entire college career, and the 4-5 years after that, growing up in Chicago during the 2000s was still an absolute blast.
Lincoln Park and Wrigleyville were like havens for young post-grads trying to drink on a budget. And some of the best, most legendary nights, revolved around these promos.
You had Parkway in Lincoln Park, right on Lincoln and Fullerton (no longer there) that used to do this crazy drink special on Monday nights- it was like a $5 cover, and then they'd serve you Coors lights in clear Dixie cups for a nickel a piece. Place would be fucking slammed, and groups would see who could stack cup snakes the highest. (Fun fact - The DJ used to love to play Lil Flip "Game Over" there like once an hour). We used to go every single week, get absolutely destroyed, hop back on the train back home, and spend the whole week swearing up and down we were never going back to Parkway Mondays ever again. But come Sunday night the itch would start to kick in, and by Monday afternoon, we were rallying the troops together again to run it back. This happened every week, for the entire summer. Every summer.
You also had $1 Corona Tuesdays at Clybournes, as well as $1 Miller Lites at McGees on Thursdays. You could go out every night of the week and get after it for like $10-20 bucks.
Then, of course, you had the northside Rogers Park bar that my DJ career took flight at The Pumping Company on Broadway and Granville. (No longer there either.)
No joke, on Saturday nights, this place did a $10 cover, and then you could "buy" a pitcher of Miller Lite for 1 cent. They called it "Penny Pitchers" and I have zero clue how this was legal. But they let me DJ it (along with Thursdays), and I played there every week for like 7 hours, for $40 a night, and we would pack the place.
Fast forward to post-college life, working and living downtown, and having to try to impress girls on dates.
Penny Pitchers at Pumping Company wasn't really getting the ladies hot and bothered in those days, so luckily, living in a world class city like city, we were blessed with places like The Violet Hour.
If you know, you know. If you don’t, I almost don’t want to explain it. Because explaining The Violet Hour ruins it a little. It was never about hype. Never about bottle service or social media clout. They didn’t even let you use your phone once you were inside.
You went because someone whispered about it to you the way people used to whisper about speakeasies. You walked past the big, wooden, rotating wall of abstract art, found the barely-visible door, and stepped into another world.
And once you were inside, you shut the fuck up. That was the deal. No yelling. No crowds. No distractions. Just velvet-draped quiet, a glowing bar, and drinks that weren’t drinks, bute moreso stories told in a glass.
Before The Violet Hour, craft cocktails in Chicago were basically non-existent. If you ordered an old fashioned in the early 2000s, odds are it came with neon cherries and Sprite. Then this place arrived and flipped the script. It didn’t just raise the standard, it wrote the standard.
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We're talking house-made syrups. Hand-carved ice. A rotating seasonal menu that wasn’t trying to be clever, it was trying to be beautiful. Bartenders didn’t show off with flair. They were focused. Everything was measured, intentional. You didn’t order vodka sodas here. You asked questions, listened, and learned.
Again, pretty commonplace nowadays, but think back 20 years ago. This place raised the bar for everybody.
It set the blueprint for every faux-speakeasy and “elevated cocktail bar” that came after it. The problem is, most of them missed the point. The Violet Hour was never trying to be cool. That’s what made it timeless.
Back before social media really began dominating every aspect of our lives, Violet Hour was known about in industry circles, and by people who ventured outside the 60601 and 60611 zip codes of Chicago. It had buzz, but in this mysterious kind of way where you never really knew if the person or people talking about it really knew what they were talking about, had ever actually been, or were just caught in an epic game of telephone.
My first date there, I was beyond nervous I wouldn’t be cool enough. Bucktown back then was even more hipster than you can imagine. If you didn't have a mustache or tattoo sleeve, you were a loser and stuck out like a sore thumb. I was terrified the door guy or girl would take one look at me and give me some "sorry we're closed for a private event" type of brush-off.
That was if I could even find the place.
I had to Google how to find the door. Once we got in, we sank into a booth so deep it felt like the world stopped. The lights were low, the music was soft, and the drinks tasted like they’d been aged in a Hemingway short story. It was incredible and truly one of a kind. It was the date spot, because you didn’t have to perform. You just had to be present.
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(And have some scratch. I'll never forget my astonishment at seeing a drink menu with $12 and $15 drinks on it. My how times have changed…)
But that’s what The Violet Hour did. It made you slow down. It made you shut off. It was one of the last places in the city where you could feel the art of conversation. And that wasn’t an accident. It was the mission.
Bars come and go. They rebrand, rename, get louder, trendier, more ‘Instagrammable.’ But The Violet Hour was always something else. It was a reminder that drinking could still be a ceremony, and getting a cocktail could be an act of connection, not just consumption.
Take into account also how quickly places get chewed up and spit out, and realize that Violet Hour was still going strong after 18 years. It did that tby building a following of not just loyal customers, but believers who appreciated attention to detail and the art of bartending. People who came for the atmosphere, the intimacy, the reverence. People who understood that sometimes the best things in life are the hardest to find, and even harder to replace.
(this place had a drink called a “yum Tom” (pause) that was one of the greatest cocktails I’ve ever had in my life. It was also the first place I ever tried one of the greatest winter drinks of all time- Mulled Wine. How I never knew about this until I came to Chicago was a drive. And Violet Hour had an ELITE mulled wine.)
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And like other great institutions, it wasn't “self-contained”.
This place wasn't just a bar. It was a freaking hospitality academy. A boot camp. A finishing school for cocktail Jedi. Half the bartenders in this city with tattoos on their fingers and bitters in their veins can trace their lineage back to that camoflouged door in Wicker Park. It was the greatest farm system the cocktail world has ever seen.
New York, quickly took notice of Violet Hour’s success. There was mild shock that a Midwestern city with a hard-drinking reputation could create sophisticated drinks. Violet Hour is credited as the originator of the Paper Plane and The Art of Choke, two standards featured on cocktail lists around the world. Bars, including Cure in New Orleans and the Silver Dollar in Louisville, were heavily influenced by the Chicago trailblazer.
Bolt later opened the fabled Bar DeVille a few blocks south on Damen. He was just one of the bar’s noted alumni. Bartender Mike Ryan took what he learned in Wicker Park and brought it downtown when Kimpton Hotels opened Sable Kitchen & Bar. The late Michael Rubel went on to Estereo. In Lincoln Park, long a neighborhood crowded by sports bars and recently graduated frat boys, Barrelhouse Flat brought classy cocktails to Lincoln Avenue thanks to Violet Hour alum Stephen Cole. Nandini Khaund brought her talents to Cindy’s off the Mag Mile. Other notable alumni include Toby Maloney and Abe Vucekovich. The latter recently opened a new bar, Friends of Friends, with Alexander.
Barbacks came out of there like Navy SEALs of shaken citrus. The bartenders graduated and went on to open their own amazing spots, like The Whistler, Billy Sunday, Lost Lake, Scofflaw, and even upmarket titans like Kumiko and The Aviary.
(Speaking of The Aviary- yes, they took things to a molecular, Instagram-baiting level, but Violet Hour walked so Aviary could levitate. That’s facts. If The Violet Hour hadn't made it cool again to take cocktails seriously, Aviary wouldn’t have had an audience. (They were also blessed to have the talent and expertise of Micah Melton) But the whole "Chicago cocktail renaissance", the idea that a drink could be an experience, not just a lubricant, that started here at Violet Hour, in a candlelit room with velvet curtains and a "no phones" rule.)
This place also wrote the bartending Bible, then spread it to a generation of bartenders who carried the gospel forward. A ripple effect that turned this city into one of the greatest cocktail towns on earth.
It will live on hopefully in another iteration, in a new location, (with more cooperative landlords and better plumbing hopefully), but no matter how far they knock it out of the park, it will never be the OG.
It’ll join the short list of places we’ll bore younger generations talking about. We’ll say things like, “You had to know someone,” or “They made the best Juliet & Romeo you’ll ever have,” or “There was this one night…” and you’ll stop, smile, and let the silent memories fill in the blanks.
P.s.- the fact these landlords had a tenant like One Off Hospitality who was cranking there for 18 years, and they didn’t move heaven and earth to fix these pipes for them is mind blowing. Good luck finding another tenant guys.