[MayorOfChicago]

Live around the corner so I've been trying out a few places. I love the hotel bar, I love West Town Bakery actually - great. Big Star is fine, Rizzos across from the hotel to the north is huge, they really gutted that place to the bones and rebuilt the entire inside. They also built on a massive patio area that's covered, restrooms downstairs with multiple stairwells. It's a default "nice' sports bar, it'll do fine.

One thing about Big Star and Smoke Daddy is that the restrooms are shared in a common hallway on the second floor. So for Big Star you walk all the way upstairs, then around a bar area, across the upstairs of the restaurant and over to a shared hallway where you pee. It's a long way from anywhere on the first floor. Also curious how to get up there if you're handicapped. I get the shared bathroom, but why on the second floor and then design the second floor that you have to walk in a horseshoe around the bar area to get to that shared hallway.

Mordecai bar I actually wasn't impressed with. The staff seemed very confused and not trained, the drinks were a little expensive and it was trying to be quite upscale - which I think is the point of the place. It just didn't seem to fit in, I don't know if I would go back and the past three nights I've walked by and it's pretty empty.

One big interesting feature is going to be how the nicer of the places, Mordecai, the hotel lobby and especially Dutch and Doc deal with the fact they are trying to get a more upscale and expensive crowd there for upscale dinners and drinks - but no matter what they do they're going to be overrun almost a hundred days of the year with blacked out drunk Cubs fans. It's just the nature of where you are. On opening day my husband and I stopped by for a drink at Mordecai. We sat down in the booth and the waiter was nice, but there were just screaming drunk Cubs people all over, and this was a day when the actual game was rained out. It was probably 7pm by now, and while I totally didn't care because I got it, it was extremely interrupting and killed the vibe for us. The tables around us were just screaming nonsense, swearing, etc.

I can see a lot of people making reservations for the upscale Dutch and Doc at 7pm on a weekend night and it's going to be a huge clash of the cultures when it's 2/3 people there for a nice dinner dressed up and classy - and the 1/3 will be shit faced fans who have been drinking all day and probably don't understand or care that they're yelling and stumbling around.

Comes with the territory, but I bet there's going to be some fights! Again, I totally get it and I would know exactly what I'm walking into having lived right near Wrigley for 10 years - but I know there are PLENTY of people who won't understand until they get there to their 7:30pm reservation from the suburbs or their hotel downtown and find a few tables around them screaming.

LOVED West Town, we only got drinks, but the drinks were well thought out and very good, the best we had of all the places we tried. The bartender was really cool and I like the setup. We just tried to peek in and the bartender waved at us, so we thought "oh, I guess we can have a drink". Ended up loving it.