Husband-and-wife owners Andrew and Renee Ragin partnered with Footman Hospitality Group on a cocktail bar built around a gimmick that actually works: weekday happy hour drinks served from cafeteria-style 'bubblers,' the kind of dispenser you'd expect to hold lemonade at a summer picnic, filled instead with real cocktails from 3 to 6pm. The food side stays tight and shareable — a $20 combo gets you chips with three different dips plus a basket of four taquitos, each a different flavor, made with house-made tortillas. It's a format built for groups splitting a spread rather than one person ordering a single entree, which fits the bar's overall low-stakes, hang-out energy.
Years after opening in a space with a track record of turnover, Kite String has become one of the space's longer-tenured tenants, with no sign of the closures that have hit other nearby bars in recent years. For anyone working the Addison Street stretch of Roscoe Village looking for an inventive happy hour rather than a standard beer-and-a-shot deal, the bubblers are worth seeking out.
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