Bar Esmé

Bar Esmé is the à la carte bar attached to Esmé, the one-Michelin-star restaurant at 2200 N Clark Street in Lincoln Park opened in August 2021 by chef Jenner Tomaska and his partner Katrina Bravo. Where the main dining room serves a tasting menu built around rotating collaborations with artists, the bar is the way into the same kitchen without committing to the full format — a smaller room, a shorter menu, and a considerably lower barrier to entry for anyone who wants to taste this cooking on a weeknight. The restaurant serves Wednesday through Sunday from 5pm.

The drinks are run by beverage director Stevan Miller, who oversees the programmes at Esmé, Bar Esmé and the group's French brasserie Petite Edith, and who came to beverages sideways — he started as a barista in California before a colleague suggested he train as a sommelier. His stated approach to zero-proof drinks is the most useful thing to know about this bar: non-alcoholic cocktails, he told Third Coast Review in February 2026, are something he thinks of before every other part of the menu. That is the opposite of the usual sequence, where a zero-proof option is reverse-engineered from a finished cocktail list, and it shows in a drink like Apple Island — apple with habanero and agave, force-carbonated so it arrives with the bite of a hard soda rather than the flatness of a juice. Miller has named it as one of the drinks he is proudest of. Two practical notes. Bar Esmé does not publish its current drink list in a working form — the menu and about pages linked from Esmé's own navigation return errors — so the list rotates and is best read on arrival. And because the beverage team changed before 2026, any zero-proof drinks named in older coverage of this bar should be treated as historical rather than current.