The Violent Hour

The Violent Hour

A Culinary Review

By PsyCHO Butcher

Chicago suffers from an unfortunate "second city" complex, a mayor who hates nightlife because his father was an abusive drunk, and a certain halfheartedness when it comes to doing anything that might be construed as "uppity". Fortunately, their is a little cloud hovering just south of the el stop at North and Damen avenues, and this strange miasma seems to block the banal rays we emit, by virtue of our own working-class chumpishness. The result is that this address spawns interesting businesses like serpents from a stone. True, the first two failed in short order. Mod was a wonderful place...the first failure-it had a science fiction flair to it, and mac and cheese so good I was tempted to break the window to the place and rob a portion from a customer. I liked the egg-and-spacemodule motif. It made me imagine I was dining on a planet where ninety percent of this dreadful species had already gone extinct, and those few of us that survived had ample deviled eggs to go around.

Del Toro had terrible service, but great furniture. Each chair was like a torture device. Fortunately, you can still see the saddle-barstools, more suited to sadomasochistic pleasure than to lattes, across the street at Cippollina. It was an interesting place, this second failure, with great tile and strange horse stalls for bathrooms.

Hopefully, The Violet Hour will stick around, because the city needs it. We need a drinking space that shrouds itself in veils of image. We need a place to drink expensive cocktails and pretend we are cooler, more literary, more travelled, and genuinely interesting than we are. We need a place that serves absinthe and chicken wings on the same menu. For now, we have it, and I approve quite strongly.

From the outside, the place is a cipher. They keep changing the exterior, from one cryptic ruse to another. Do not look for a sign, you will not find one. Once the valet starts parking cars, this is merely annoying, but just as they open the doors, it imparts a bit of a speakeasy feel to the place. To augment this, the entranceway is dark and heavily curtained, stark, and obviously purposed to give would-be patrons the unmistakable impression that they have walked into the wrong place and should leave. I like this. Darkness, drama, chandeliers, and very tall chairs that resemble thrones. This place is very black metal, and to risk belaboring the point, I approve. The place feels such like a maze-a patron needing to tiptoe and squeeze between chairs in the event that they do not guess the correct path across the room in the darkness, amid a forest of overly tall seats-that is was disappointed not to see a corner devoted solely to death traps for the unwary. Perhaps such a thing is too much to ask in a place that carries a Chicago Liquor license, but their cocktails are deliciously inventive and served with an air of drama.

The place seems purposed to scare away tourists, frat boys, and the lame. To seal the deal, the place has a dress code and requests that patrons do not use cellphones.

Now comes the subject that your churlish and stupid friends will raise, either at the mere mention of the place, or upon discovering that the cocktails there cost something like fourteen dollars each (I frankly do not remember, for reasons I will mention in a moment). They are worth it, each and every one. Of course they are. The bartenders lavish time and care on each drink, and use very fine ingredients. Neither of these objections hold any weight whatsoever if a person visits for the purpose of imbibing one, or perhaps at most, two cocktails. After all, who goes out in the evening expecting to spend less than twenty dollars (a person must factor in the tip)? Such frugal evenings are best spent, enjoyably, on the fire escape, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and trying to eek the last resin out of a cannabis pipe. Places like this are for the theatre and ambiance of the place, and if a good buzz is needed, that must wait for the second, or third drinking establishment of the evening. What would be the purpose of having more, at a place like this? To get drunk? Getting drunk at swanky clubs is for the stupid-for people who order bottles of expensive vodka served to their tables at night clubs and covet the experience of the VIP room. People like that can die, frankly.

I arrived with my usual coterie of exotic dancers and adult film stars, on a weeknight, just after they opened. I suppose I avoided the line by doing this, but the fact of the matter is that my companions had serious work to do later in the evening, bilking needy men out of money they would otherwise spend on their families. My cocktail was something called a Vincent's Downfall, a Van Gough reference, of course, an homage to its liberal use of absinthe. It was delicious. One of my companions, a longtime friend for many years, devoured a whole plate of chicken wings without stopping. If you have never watched a sexy woman, trained in the art of adult entertainment, devour a full plate of chicken wings as if the Earth was about to run out of food, you should. I do not remember much about our conversation, absorbed by lust as I was the whole time, but it was a great experience and a great room to showcase desire and lust of all sort, for chicken wings or otherwise.