Last month, Block Club Chicago broke the news that Texas cooler company Yeti would open its second brick-and-mortar store in the 4,796-square-foot Wicker Park space occupied till February 2017 by long-running music venue the Double Door. Earlier this month, the odds of the venue reopening in the neighborhood apparently declined to zero when a sign reading “Future home of the brand new Double Door” appeared at a Smashing Pumpkins pop-up at the Wilson Avenue Theater in Uptown.
The neighborhood’s bona fides as a destination for serious music people got a boost in September, when a new venture called Dorian’s opened in a storefront of the Flat Iron Arts Building at 1939 W. North. The space includes an intimate bar and restaurant with a small stage for live music and DJs (ostensibly the main draw), but from the sidewalk you can’t see any of that: it’s all hidden behind a tiny, brightly lit record store. The store’s wide, shallow space is just 120 square feet, and its listening room, equipped with a turntable and headphones, is only slightly bigger than a phone booth. The only way to get into the bar and restaurant (a much more generous 2,500 square feet) is through a sliding door in the western wall of the listening room. The name “Dorian’s” doesn’t appear anywhere on the front of the building. Instead the front door says “The Record Shop” and lists hours of operation unusual for a retail space: 5 PM till 2 AM Thursday through Saturday, 5 PM till midnight Wednesday and Sunday.
“People were really kind of focused, and insistent even, on grooving to the music, even though it might be some spiritual-jazz track that was 20 years old,” Bryl says. “There was an interest I didn’t understand at the time that existed out there. I think it has some relationship to how artists like Kamasi Washington, and even how people on the International Anthem label like Makaya McCraven, are making inroads into the mainstream. It was a heartening thing to see people’s interest in music I thought they might not have a relationship at all to.”
Eastman and his collaborators intended to give the bar and restaurant at Dorian’s a tiki feel: chef Brian Fisher, formerly of Schwa and Entente, devised a menu distantly inspired by Polynesian food, and beverage director John Hess included tiki-inspired cocktails on his menu. They were less interested in tiki-bar kitsch, though, and more in creating an immersive experience. After my pre-Thanksgiving visit, when I caught DJ sets by Star Creature Universal Vibrations owner Tim Zawada and Chicago hip-hop legend the Twilite Tone, I got a mild shock when I stepped back onto the sidewalk and into the cold wind, in part because it’s impossible to see the street from inside—I’d temporarily forgotten where I was.
