LOGAN SQUARE — Are you ready for a new schmancy cocktail bar, Logan Square?
Too bad. You're getting one anyway.
But Analogue owners Henry Prendergast and Robby Haynes said patrons — and bartenders — can leave the suit vests at home because their new bar is going to provide a more casual atmosphere with those high-end cocktails.
"It's much less structured," said Haynes, formerly of dress-code-requiring The Violet Hour. "It'll be little louder, a little looser, a little rowdier."
Music will be a main focus of the bar, which will feature resident and guest DJs Wednesdays through Saturdays.
As for opening in Logan Square, Haynes said he and Prendergast, also a former Violet Hour bartender, both live in the neighborhood and are excited to be opening up shop close to home.
"I think in Logan Square there's an opportunity to do things that are creative and outside the box," Haynes said. "I think you can take more risks here than you could, say, in Lakeview or Wicker Park or the Randolph Corridor."
A New Orleans-inspired menu by chef Alfredo Nogueira will offer appetizers and entrees at an affordable range of $3 to $11, and feature items like po' boys, perch dinner, chicken and andouille gumbo, or a basket of buttermilk biscuits served with pepper jelly and butter made from Steen's cane syrup.
And those cocktails?
Opening night creations will include the Strike Anywhere (Yahara Bay V Bourbon, DeMuth Vermouth, Montmorency Cherry and Angostura Bitters) and the End of the Century (New Holland Freshwater Huron Rum, Lime, House Cacao and Gaslight Coffee) among others, but Analogue also dedicates a section of its menu to a drink less familiar to 21st century drinkers — purls.
Mentioned in works of Shakespeare and Dickens, the purl — a beer infused with wormwood or another "bittering agent" — dates back to as early as the 16th century, but doesn't seem to have gotten a whole lot of play in the last 150 years or so.
Haynes and Prendergast will be making their own bittering agents, such as a strawberry-angelica-allspice version, and another flavored with blackberries, woodruff, anise and orange peel.
"The drinks here — that's one thing we do amazingly," Haynes said.
Analogue will be open nightly from 6 p.m.-2 a.m. (3 a.m. on Saturdays). It will be closed on Tuesdays.
