If you want to troll a depressing gay bar, head to Andersonville, where video screens showing blurry, joyless porn are a dime a dozen and neon beer signs featuring the gay rainbow hang against acres of black-painted plywood. The boy bins on Halsted near Belmont are less inviting still, with their polished brass and genteel prices. But Big Chicks at Argyle and Sheridan–a refurbished art deco storefront where a sign behind the vintage bar gives a definition of the German word gemutlichkeit (“an agreeable, cheerful, cozy feeling; a sense of well-being”)–looks like a house party that moved into an art gallery. There’s no dearth of spunk-shooting beefcake on the monitors, but you can also catch an episode of Ab Fab. The woodwork’s painted in sultry hues, thick curtains cover the windows, and paintings and photos by Chicago artists are crammed mosaic-style onto the walls. Michelle Fire, the bar’s owner since 1986, was supposedly the model for the life-size painted cutout of a towering, corseted drag queen that greets drinkers at the door with a glowing globe of the earth balanced above her head on one formal-length glove.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
She invited the living artists represented at Tweet to contribute their favorite breakfast recipes to the menu. You can have photographer Robert Steigler’s buckwheat pancakes plus a side for $6; for $3.50 you can savor Bob Thall’s morning repast, a cup of black coffee and a multipack of vitamins. The food shares the nightclub’s spirit of wholesome debauchery: it’s diner stuff, mostly eggs, stacks, and steaks, but made with a reasonable amount of grease and as many organic ingredients as possible. “Real farms run seasonally,” says Fire, so sometimes factory food must do. But whenever she can she gets eggs from an Amish farmers collective in Minnesota. The Amish also provide pastured pork and salad-bar beef: both terms mean the animals munched plants in pastures, not grain from troughs. When made with all-natural spuds, the hash browns seem extra fluffy.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
