Josh Deth was working as a brewer at Goose Island a few years ago when he and some friends started scouting the city for a place to open their own brew pub–a “lefty, political” kind of place to be called the Revolution Brewing Company. He had experience in the business at the now defunct Golden Prairie microbrewery on Elston as well as Goose Island, and even went ahead and bought some scrap equipment. The plan nearly came to fruition three times, but in the end every deal fell through. “The emotional up and down, it kind of wears on you,” he says.
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Deth, who’s 28, went on to work as a public policy researcher for the Chicago Rehab Network, and in 2001 he started graduate work in urban planning at UIC. But then, early last fall, he saw a message from a friend, John Greenfield, on a local listserv run by members of the bike advocacy movement Critical Mass. Greenfield thought it would be cool to open a restaurant catering to bicyclists, and he had a name–the Handlebar–picked out already. He just needed some partners. Deth bit.
“We had ten people in painting last week,” Deth says. “Some people are going to be working here, some people are investing money to make it happen. We’re getting some bicycle furniture from [Blackstone Bicycle Works director] Andy Gregg….He’s making us some bar stools out of old recycled chrome steel rims. It has been a very nice kind of community effort.”
