Lemon: New Cocktail/Music Venue with Appeal
A glimpse at the new Chicago bar in the West Town neighborhood
Classic Cocktails, Bud on Tap
I first met Seth Blumenthal in his role as board chairman of The Abundance Setting, a chef-driven, Chicago-based non-profit that advocates for better working conditions and opportunities for women — especially women with children — in the culinary industry.
We first connected at a panel about The Abundance Setting during The James Beard Foundation Awards weekend in June 2022. Not long after, Seth clued me in that he and his business partners were planning to open a bar named Lemon in the not-distant future.
Like all such projects, it took time for that future to be now, but Lemon opened its doors in late December. It is located at 1600 W. Grand at Ashland in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, filling the space vacated by Grand Bar several years ago.
Its hours are 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. Mondays through Wednesdays and 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. In addition to its beverage program and a short menu of snacks, Lemon has a stage that will host live performances after the establishment obtains its entertainment license.
I visited with Seth before opening time recently to discuss what the plans for Lemon are; how he gave up a first career as tech and data director for the American Medical Association to become a bar owner; his co-owning partnership with industry veterans Zak McMahon, Jeremy Owen Barrett and Mason McIntire; and why they chose to locate in West Town, a longtime industrial part of Chicago that’s a bit off the beaten path. The following is an excerpted Q&A edited for length and clarity.
Q: You are not new to the culinary industry. Please talk a little bit about your background.
A: I was always interested in food and beverage. I worked in a grocery store when I was in high school and really liked it. I worked in Walmart... I had a totally different career... but I had some experiences back in the kind of pre-pandemic times with coffee shops and restaurants that made me want... to have a relationship with the business... I ended up taking a part-time job at a coffee shop back in 2018. So I was working a full-time office job in healthcare and worked weekends in a coffee shop. I was interested in becoming an owner of a business like this, but everybody told me you should work and get some experience. I spent three or four years working various jobs...
I love being in the industry... I’m really passionate about Chicago and trying to be someone who plays a role in building and maintaining Chicago's cultural scene with a focus on food and beverage and hospitality. The pandemic certainly did a lot of damage to the scene... But we still deserve to have a vibrant, independent scene where there's creativity and culture and there's a vibe and atmosphere that's uniquely Chicago.
Q: Food was a career switch for me too, after my wife and I moved to Chicago in 2011. This community really is extraordinary, and I was amazed to see how quickly I was able to engage in the local food community and make friends and connections and grow my network
A: There's a nice balance in the independent scene. We're in this to make money, we want to be profitable... But we're all in this together... Great chefs in Chicago, great bar owners and operators in Chicago, there's a sense that we're part of a scene and we're all contributing together... There's just a lot of people helping each other, business owners, people, leaders who work in the industry. Everybody comes to support each other's businesses when they can.
Q: How did you guys decide to work together, and how did the idea for Lemon evolve over time?
A: Business partnership is challenging, it's difficult. You have to have the right combination of people and personalities and skills to make a partnership. But partnerships allow people to accomplish things that they couldn't by themselves. So we got together through a combination of longtime friendships and respect for each other and being in the same industry, and also building on each other's skills... I've known them for four or five years now, but some of them have known each other longer... They all had different paths, music, dance, acting, all ended up in this industry... We have different but complementary skills.
Q: How did you decide on this location?
A: West Town was always the base of our search. We searched a pretty wide area of the city, but we felt this part of West Town has a nice combination of traditional Chicago history, new and old businesses, new and old residents. It's improving, but it's not rapidly gentrifying, it's still a bit rustic and a bit gritty, I would say. It's still an affordable area... So this is a bar that is for the neighborhood. And you know, everything from fancy cocktails to Budweiser on tap and beer and shots specials give us a nice range of affordability and quality that we think is a good fit for this area...
We hope to be around for a long time as a resource for this area that kind of lacks an identity as part of West Town. We were thinking something like Grand Corridor [a reference to its location on Grand Ave.] could be an identity that we're trying to promote a little bit....
We collabed with Casa Humilde [located nearby] to come up with a Lemon Hefeweizen, which is our house brew. So just supporting local businesses, even on the block. Our Espresso Martini uses a cold brew concentrate from Metric, which is also walking distance away,
Q: What kind of welcome can visitors expect at Lemon?
A: It's something we call Modern Hospitality... There have been many attempts over the years to change the perception of this industry and move away from using the word “service,” something like “hospitality,” which includes service but also includes something else, an authentic expression of a person who feels empowered to take care of guests as if the business was their own home... Essentially taking some of the elements of fine dining hospitality, the high touch, the attention to detail, but just toning it down and making it more casual.
It's other things too. It's providing health benefits. We found an innovative small company in Minnesota, River Health, that has allowed us to provide reasonably priced basic health benefits even for part-time employees, which is not something a lot of businesses offer.
Q: You’ve said your priority, first and foremost, is to be a neighborhood bar.
A: This physical bar is from the previous buildout, but we cleaned it up and stained it and changed some things... Once we have shows, people will come for shows, but fundamentally, this is a place where you can feel comfortable using this as your neighborhood bar, coming a couple of times a week, having a beer and a shot.
Q: Especially in Chicago winter, when weather can be an issue.
A: Chicago has many old cultural tropes and jokes. There's two seasons, winter and construction. And if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. Everybody new to Chicago learns them on their first or second day here. But in the summer we go out, we have the lakefront, we have festivals. What do we do in the winter, we stay inside and drink. So we hope this is a kind of place where people could do that in a way that's comfortable and suitable to their preferences, whether they want a fancy cocktail or a good old classic Budweiser from St. Louis...
It's a celebration of the classic cocktails, but with recipes that we feel reflect the best of what the industry has learned over the last couple of decades...
Q: Let’s talk about the performance space.
A: Lemon will always be primarily a cocktail bar, but the stage is a very important part of this concept... We're going to start with a couple of nights a week, music and other other live performances on the stage. And we're going to try to figure out a way to do it so that it's compatible with a cocktail bar atmosphere...
We want an atmosphere that is kind of like a classic Chicago jazz room. This is not a jazz club, we're going to have a variety of different types of music... But we like that atmosphere, we think it fits well with classic cocktails, fits well with Chicago... We saw a gap in a place that has a stage that also has good cocktails.
Q: Before we wrap up, please let’s do an update on The Abundance Setting.
A: We continue to operate a program that focuses on mentoring of women and working mothers in culinary and hospitality... We had a program we used to call Meal Relief during the pandemic. We've rebranded it Three Chefs, Three Moms. It's a cohort-based, short-term mentoring program that leaves alumni and our community with access to resources and services that we're building all the time. We're going to do our first fundraising gala this year, later in the year... We did a round of Three Chefs, Three Moms in Los Angeles, we're gonna expand to other cities, potentially D.C. at some point soon... We want to just continue to be a resource for women and people who identify as women in this community and this industry. It can be a really harsh place to work for women, especially women who want to have a family. Nobody asks a male chef, “Who's taking care of your kids?” But everybody asks that of a female-identifying chef.
We're not saying we can totally change the culture. We want to make some changes, require the industry to change, some require policy changes. But if we can just be a little small part of that over time, we think time and money is worth the investment.
Q: Last question... How is Lemon dealing with the controversy over the practice in some restaurants of adding a service charge to patrons’ checks?
A: We've had a lot of debates about service charges and paying living wages. All of our staff are making at or above the minimum wage, we're not using the sub-minimum wage, even though we legally still can because we're a certain size employer. We're providing some degree of health benefits that we’re offering a no charge, even the part-timers...
We decided just to put a note on the menu and on the ticket that the guests get that we've incorporated these costs into our prices. So we've we've put the cents into the prices that sort of reflect that 5 percent pays for healthcare, helps us support our stage, things like that, versus tacking it on at the end as a service charge.
Learn About Fire Cider in Natural Awakenings
It’s always a pleasure to share content from my friends at Natural Awakenings Chicago. Their January 2024 issue contains an article by Veronica Hinke about fire cider, a spicy plant-based concoction with immunity-building qualities.
The story’s lead:
Fire ciders — potent herbal vinegar tonics made with powerful roots, vegetables and herbs like ginger, horseradish, turmeric, echinacea, rosemary, hot peppers, onions, garlic and more — can help be a mid-winter immune system boost that we all need this time of year. It’s the season of sniffles and stuffed noses, but a growing group of herbalists believe that a good batch of fire cider can go a long way in improving health.
To read more — and get a recipe to make your own fire cider — click the button below.
Bob’s World, and Welcome to It
Two days ago, Lake Michigan was ice-free, the result of a winter that — until this week — had been unseasonably warm. But with the deep freeze of sub-zero temperatures, there is ice on the lake, extending into Belmont Harbor in the foreground.
This has a bearing on last week’s quirky weather forecasts. Two storms reached our region, and areas well west of the lake had plenty of snow. But in much of Chicago, especially on its east side, we barely got a ground covering, causing many people to rage about overblown predictions of up to a foot of snow.
The problem, as with much of the region’s increasingly unpredictable weather, has to do with global climate change. When those storms passed by, the lake temperatures were in the mid to upper 30s. And the storms were situated in such a way that strong winds blew over those warmer-than-usual waters and turned snow to rain.
There’s a old saying that timing is everything. Had the cold wave preceded the storms, those predictions of piled-up snow in the city probably would have come true.