“There are no rules in shots,” Henry Prendergast says. He and Robert Haynes are preparing a sort of miniature cocktail inspired by the old-fashioned and modeled after a tequila shot: you lick your hand, shake some demerara sugar on it, lick the sugar, take the shot (whiskey with a little Angostura bitters in it), and then bite a slice of orange.
The drink was a whiskey smash—one of the simplest cocktails there is. Haynes has tried to re-create it since, but can’t do it. “I think you have to be soaking wet and dehydrated and hungry and then sit down for the first time in 15 hours to really get it.”
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Paul McGee, who was the head bartender at the Whistler from the time it opened in 2008 until he left at the beginning of last year to open the new, wildly popular tiki bar Three Dots and a Dash in River North, says that the Whistler built its reputation on time-intensive, creative cocktails—but it wasn’t conceived with that aim in mind. According to McGee, the owners envisioned a simple neighborhood bar with live music and art, and when they hired him as bartender, he asked if he could put together a cocktail list. He expected to sell 30 to 35 cocktails a night, but the first Friday the bar was open they served about 230; by the time he left, they were doing 450 cocktails on a typical weekend night.
Paul Lynn Miller, 68, owner of Helen’s Two Way Lounge and son of Helen Estep, who opened the bar in 1965, has seen the neighborhood change over the years—several times. “It was OK, and then it was bad, and then it was OK again,” he says. “But even so, I have a man on each door.” (The Two Way gets its name from the fact that it has entrances on both Milwaukee and Fullerton.) The bar has changed with the times, according to Miller. It used to be a lounge with booths, candles on the tables, a bandstand, and live polka music—the official name was the Two Way Polka Lounge. Families would come in on the weekends. “Over the years, they started picking up the candles and throwing them at each other. The clientele changed,” Miller says.
Demographic shifts have accompanied—and are no doubt responsible for—the influx of businesses. Comparing Logan Square to that earlier poster child of gentrification, Wicker Park, is an inexact science. But in 1990, both Logan Square and West Town—the community area that includes Wicker Park, the Ukrainian Village, Pulaski Park, and Noble Square—had Hispanic populations of about 65 percent and white populations of about 27 percent (West Town’s black population was just under 10 percent, compared to about 5 percent for Logan Square). Between 1990 and 2000, West Town underwent a demographic shift very similar to the one that Logan Square experienced between 2000 and 2010, with a dramatic decrease in the number of Hispanic residents (to 47 percent) and increase in the number of white residents (to 40 percent). By 2010 the balance had tipped to a mostly white population—57 percent, compared to 29 percent Latino.
Nor is she worried about being forced out. She owns the building—back in the 80s when the neighborhood was bad, it was the only area where she and her husband could afford to buy anything—and doesn’t believe her customer base will disappear. “I think there’s always a place for the neighborhood bar,” she says.
Despite Haynes’s assertion that they’re not opening a cocktail bar, the cocktail menu is a major focus. It’s divided into three sections, the first of which will be determined by the current obsessions of the bartenders who work there. Each bartender will have five to six cocktails on the menu, and Prendergast and Haynes envision it as a way to explore ideas in a new way. “Say I’m really into split-based cocktails, like rum and gin—let me explore that, get to the bottom of it,” Haynes says. “You can really understand it and what it means, do it for two months, and then be like, yup, I’m done with that, let’s move on.”
