Nine Bar is Chinatown’s first cocktail bar, located behind the Moon Palace Express takeout counter. Owners Lily Wang (whose parents own Moon Palace) and Joe Briglio mix up “Asian-ish” takes on classic cocktails, creating Old Fashioneds, highballs, and margaritias with baiju, soju, and shochu. Punch has named it one of the best new bars of 2023.

A trio of chefs who met while working at Art Smith’s Table 52 opened Warlord in April, creating a 45-seater with late-night food service, appealing to restaurant and bar workers who need a place to decompress after long shifts. The result is a boisterous restaurant with two bars and a cocktail list from Augustus “Gus” Federici, formerly of GreenRiver and Testaccio. The constantly evolving menu currently features drinks like a Hemingway Daiquiri and a Strawberry Boulevard. Seasonal non-alcoholic drinks like a strawberry lemonade are also available. A patio is upcoming.

The owners of boho haven Beatnik and Michelin-starred Porto seek to top themselves yet again with Kashmir, an opulent new bar and lounge that debuted in late June with lavish new digs on Randolph Restaurant Row. Inspired in part by the hedonistic 1980s club scenes in New York and London, Kashmir serves a menu of playful, easy-drinking cocktails like the Space Cowboy (tequila, coconut, rectified pineapple juice, edible strawberry glitter) and yuzu margarita (anejo tequila, fortified wine). Visual art aficionados will also appreciate its custom collection of eight paintings by famed Spanish neo-expressionist Domingo Zapata.

In West Town, Diego is a bar with exceptional casual Baja Med food from chef Stephen Sandoval who earlier this year finished a residency at Soho House, testing his Sueños menu. As Sandoval preps for the launch of his dinner-focused restaurant, Diego is a dive bar with drinks from veteran Chicago bartender Danielle Lewis. Lewis mixes several creative spins using agave spirits to complement the burritos and other food. The marketing materials describe Diego as a dive bar. Maybe the windows let in too much sunlight for that to be true, but whatever you want to call Diego, just enjoy a drink on the patio.

Middle Brow continues to reinvent itself in Logan Square. The brewery, which has a love for wild beers and makes some of the city’s best pizza, has dove head first into the world of natural wine, offering funky and easy-going pours with grapes from Michigan and California. This move has created Chicago’s first natural winery.

Division Street in Wicker Park has seen a few phases in recent years. Once a neighborhood for creatives, the bar scene has shifted to more sporty and family-friendly. Desert Hawk reverses that trend, returning a little charm to the area. The West Coast owners want to bring a little of the Golden State to Chicago with tequila drinks and an arsenal of cocktails. The food is also noteworthy: there are tacos and smash burgers from Cocina Sublime. Formerly known as Taco Sublime, they’ve popped up at Marz Community Brewing and Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club and specialized in cheesy, griddled food.

When playing sports, school kids — after a play goes awry — will ask for a “do-over.” When they get older, they “rage-quit” and turn off their video game console after the result isn’t satisfactory. At Nisos in West Loop, the Greek concept didn’t work, so they also reset and are shifting toward a beefier, “more accessible” menu. While the full dining room won’t reopen until later in the fall, the bar and lounge have reopened with cocktails and some of the elements from the team behind Hampton Social. Whatever the interiors look like, the prime location will draw an attractive crowd for people watching.

Chicago loves its tropical drinks, especially during bitter winters. In Uptown, a first-time restaurant owner has opened Marina’s Bistro and Rum Bar which serves Puerto Rican cuisine. Find ridiculous concoctions like the “El Viejo San Juan cocktail” (coconut rum, pineapple rum, pineapple juice, coconut cream). It’s a four-seat bar, so this is a place for an early nightcap if customers aren’t eating a full meal.

It’s finally here — Guinness’ gargantuan brewery has opened, north of Randolph Restaurant Row and Fulton Market. They don’t pour liquor — only beer — and there are different Guinness variants, some of which are even brewed on sight. There’s also a series of non-alcoholic drinks and beer cocktails. The kitchen makes food including Irish pub classics and items with Jamaican and African influences — places where Guinness has breweries. During the day, Intelligentsia coffee and Aya pastries are available.

The Bourgeois Pig, a coffee shop in Lincoln Park, has served DePaul students and others in the community for three decades. Ownership decided to remodel the upstairs apartment space, turning it into a speakeasy, leaning into gangster lore — customers even need a password to enter; the steel door comes from a Prohibition-era speakeasy. At night, the rest of the coffee shop morphs into a wine bar where customers can with their turns until a space upstairs opens up. The cocktails are aces and ownership has made a real effort to make the space feel like stepping back into a bygone era.

Nobody’s Darling, the joyfully defiant queer bar that earned James Beard nods in Andersonville, unveiled a significant expansion in October that nearly doubled its capacity and added a second bar. They’ve also added some new drinks named for Black queer legends including Nina Simone (mezcal, sumac, ginger, banana) and Eartha Kitt (gin, Aperol, Earl Grey, cucumber bitters). Co-owners Renauda Riddle and Angela Barnes, two of only three Black owners of LGBTQ bars in Chicago, plan to follow up with a sister bar on the city’s South Side.

It’s been a minute since Deep Red Wine Merchants announced their wine shop, an ideal component to complement Logan Square’s bizarre obsession with horror. The shop isn’t horror themed, but with a need like “Deep Red” a customer’s imagination can wander. Folks can attend wine classes or Dungeons & Dragons events at the store or grab a few bottles for home consumption.