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Home / Businesses / Belmont Tavern

Belmont Tavern

Avondale · Cocktail Bar Community-sourced, unverified
📍 3405 W Belmont Ave, Chicago, IL 60618

Belmont Tavern wasn't supposed to happen.

$$
A 26-cocktail menu organized by base spirit, including the Casual Affair (a rye drink cut with sour dark beer) that Chicago Magazine called out as genuinely great — in a 132-year-old building that spent decades as a neighborhood Polish dive before this revival.

Nick Kokonas — not the Tock-and-Alinea Nick Kokonas, a different bartender entirely, with stints at Longman & Eagle, Queen Mary, and GreenRiver — was closing in on a cafe deal that fell apart, then walked past a for-lease sign on a dormant Polish dive bar that had sat empty since 2000. The building itself dates to 1890 as a butcher shop and saloon, and rather than scrub that history out, Kokonas built the new bar around it — Old Style still pours on draft, the room still reads like Avondale rather than a design-forward import, and the drink menu (26 cocktails, organized by base spirit with a lighter and a stronger option in each) treats that dive-bar DNA as a feature, not a problem to solve. Chicago Magazine singled out the Casual Affair, a rye drink cut with sour dark beer, as genuinely great, at $12 like the rest of the list. The real find, though, is the happy-hour-style 'Bus Tracker' — six ounces of Old Style and a shot for $4, a nod to the bar literally sitting at the entrance to the Belmont Blue Line stop.

It's open seven days a week, 3 p.m. to 1 a.m., which is a schedule built around a neighborhood that drinks after work, not before. Licensing delays pushed the February 2026 opening back a bit, but it's been pouring since, with real reviews on file to prove it. No Instagram handle or website confirmed in research.

Specials at Belmont Tavern

(1)

Belmont Tavern

Bus Tracker · $4
AvondaleCommunity

Hours

Daily3pm-1am
📅 Reservations not available 🥡 Takeout unconfirmed

Amenities & accessibility

🚶Walk-in only, no reservations
❔Takeout: unverified
❔Wheelchair access: unverified

Location

🧭 Apple Maps 📍 Google Maps

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