Chances are the only time you’ve seen the back room of a casino is at the movies: a ritzy menagerie dripping with ostentatiousness, stinking of moneyed gluttony and underworld dealings. Curiously enchanting, no? It is for Fat Rice co-owner Abraham Conlon. The excessive casino life in Macau, China, inspired the Logan Square restaurant’s new cocktail bar The Ladies’ Room (2957 W. Diversey Ave.), opening tomorrow with the most imaginative beverage program Chicago will likely see all year.
“This is a Fat Rice funhouse now,” Conlon said. What’s most impressive is that Conlon and co-owner Adrienne Lo, both James Beard Foundation-nominated chefs, have basically no mixology experience. Yet the sultry cocktail den—with a number of enticing housemade spirit infusions born out of a desire to cut down on food waste—is so quintessentially Fat Rice, an internationally recognized restaurant regarded for ceaselessly bending the rules.
ASIAN ADVENTURE
To access the bar, walk through the bakery, with whitewashed wood, seafoam-green walls and birdcage light fixtures. A single corridor connects the bakery to the restaurant, and if you’re not careful, you might walk right past the curtained-off passageway that leads to The Ladies’ Room.
The bakery and bar were conceived after Conlon and Lo spent a month traveling Asia, where they studied cuisines and culture in Macau, Hong Kong, Malacca and Singapore. Conlon summed up Macanese casinos as “Las Vegas times 10.” Think “ritzy, dirty style” without the prostitutes and drugs (though the team jokes about creating an opiate-inspired cocktail). The room has a hazy ruby glow from red lightbulbs and crimson walls covered in vintage Asian pin-up posters and cigarette ads.
There’s seating for fewer than 20 and barely room for the tiny bar, which was made from Lo’s grandparents’ ornate lacquer cabinets. Red vinyl snakeskin upholstery covers the booths, offering a provocative contrast to the 6-foot-tall painting of an Asian Madonna with child, a reproduction of the one at the Chapel of St. Francis Xavier in Macau. The cheeky brothel-meets-cathedral vibe doesn’t stop there. Pew-like seating and a bar top made from steps of a Polish church are accessorized with posters of nip-slipping ladies. It’s enough to make your pearl-clutching granny blush.
“It’s not necessarily the most savory of cocktail bars,” Conlon said. “We’re doing dirty [bleep]. It’s not all proper. And the snakeskin—that’s sexy, it’s dirty. We want to evoke an emotion, and who doesn’t want to be sexy?”
According to Conlon, Macanese casino lifestyle is about prestige and garishness. “They’ll buy a bottle of Louis XIII [a $3,000 cognac] and dump it into a bucket of Sprite,” he said. It’s about showing off what you can afford, and while most cocktails at The Ladies’ Room range from $13–$18, Conlon is also keeping a heavy stock of high-end sipping spirits on hand—scotches, cognacs, Japanese whiskies and bottles of Bordeaux.
That swank carries over to the cocktail menu, too. The Grande Royale, ringing up at a whopping $280, serves eight to 10 and is a concoction of house creme de cassis, cognac, house “Campari,” Calvados apple brandy, allspice dram and Peychaud’s and housemade wild lemon bitters served in a gallon jar topped off with a bottle of grower champagne. But it’s not an exclusionary environment. It’s dark, it’s seedy, there’s rap bumping loudly and there’s something for everyone.
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
A novice to the beverage world, Conlon doesn’t want Fat Rice to be a cocktail mecca.
“Either you’ve gotta know the rules to break them first or you just say, ‘You know what, I’m making my own rules,’ ” said Conlon, who works closely with Lo and beverage manager Annie Beebe-Tron.
But his approach is intuitive and research-based, which is to be expected for an owner of a restaurant heavily influenced by Macau, a former Portuguese colony on the South China Sea with a cuisine that blends Cantonese, Portuguese, Indian and African styles. He and his team draw from his classic training in French, haute and modern cuisines and Macanese food—”the most esoteric fusion cuisine on the planet,” he said. “It’s just another way of cooking and understanding flavors.”
More than that, The Ladies’ Room is the next step in the Fat Rice evolution. It’s not about being the next top mixologist; it’s about having a thirst for knowledge.
“For me, I want to know it all, and not because I want to be the coolest kid at the party,” Conlon said. “I’m just trying to do stuff in a fun way [that] allows us to be creative and express ourselves in a different way that isn’t necessarily through food.”
With that understanding of flavor, he’s able to reverse-engineer cocktails and spirits. And Conlon is thorough in not overlooking the fundamentals. He said they turned to old bartending books and local bars they trust to study the classics and conducted tastings along the way. While you won’t find classics on this menu, the expectation to know how to make them isn’t lost on Conlon (he even allowed olive juice with MSG in the restaurant because it makes a better dirty martini).
There’s a lofty selection of plays on classics, albeit all pretty unusual, like the spicy Dr. Manhattan ($14). It’s a nuclear concoction of barrel-aged rye, vermouth and a house infusion with the speculative ingredients in Dr Pepper—stuff like cherries, prunes, long pepper, carrot tops and coriander—plus scorpion pepper, one of the hottest in the world, all aged in a CH Distillery fernet barrel.
Conlon took a more adventurous approach to the “Vermouth” cocktail ($18), which is served straight up on an antique silver tray with a miniature crystal pitcher sidecar of the same dry blanca vermouth, a bowl of ice with tiny tongs, dry herbs (clove, cinnamon, wormwood, gentian and orange peel) and “tinctures to think and tinker” in tiny cork-capped medicine vials. Essentially, the sipper can play bartender, dropping in dry herbs and adding housemade tinctures as they go.
Despite the involved ingredients, the cocktails are fun, a priority for Conlon. His bijou reimagined is called Run the Jewels ($14) for the hip-hop group he loves, and the Be Somebody ($15), a rum-based cocktail with jerk spices, is named after one of his favorite films, “The Jerk.” Those who understand the reference can take their own meta selfie with the Steve Martin card that comes with the drink. It’s even got the pink umbrella.
MAD FLAVOR
The Ladies’ Room cocktails follow the same regionally specific route as the food, but the menu doesn’t brag on itself enough. House versions of Campari, Chartreuse and Malort could all be passed off as another approach to the infusions trend in cocktailing, but Fat Rice’s spirits and bitters—inspired by Chinese medicinal extractions—go far beyond that. While local distilleries have recreated Malort, Conlon’s play on spirits such as Campari and creme de cassis are far more intuitive than adding a little lavender to vodka.
The house Chartreuse, for example, is a blend of infusions made with neutral grain spirits, cut-up barrel staves from Rare Tea Cellar and stems and clippings of more than 50 herbs—marigolds, lovage, American bergamot, angelica root and mint. At the front, the yellow-green liquid stings, like biting into something bitter and menthol-y, but it’s sweet and grassy and smells dark like leather.
The goal isn’t to make better versions of the real stuff, Conlon said. And while the effort isn’t cheap, it’s an ingenious way to create similar flavor combinations that are more specific to Fat Rice than what’s on the market.
“We’re taking our knowledge of spices and aromatics from the cuisines we pull from … and looking at it like, how do we want this drink to taste? Not necessarily, what do we have to use?” Conlon said.
It’s also a way to hold onto flavors that aren’t available all year long. “A lot of this started because we had all of [these seasonal ingredients], and we can’t possibly put it all on the plate,” Lo said.
For instance, they get a lot of heirloom citrus fruit in the winter months—cara cara oranges, blood oranges, mandarins and various types of grapefruits. In an effort to use everything, Conlon dried the peels to make a play on Campari. He infused them in CH Distillery vodka with wormwood and cochineal insects, which originally gave Campari that deep red color (an employee happened to have some on hand for textile dyeing).
“It’s a cool way to capture the season and take that into another season,” Conlon said.
BOTTOM LINE
The cocktail program at The Ladies’ Room fits right into Chicago’s innovative and creative beverage landscape. Though meticulously crafted, it stands out from the rest—especially as a first attempt at cocktailing by two chefs.
For a bar born out of the necessity to make something out of food waste, it skimps on nothing, living up to Fat Rice’s reputation for bucking trends in favor of totally wacky flavor combinations that leave you wanting more. While edgy and weird and curiously alluring, it’s unpretentious and approachable; each element has a purpose. And it’s fun, right down to the pink umbrella.
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