Bokeh

Bokeh is a neighbourhood cocktail bar at 4716 N Kedzie Avenue in Albany Park, two blocks north of the Kedzie Brown Line stop, and it describes itself as craft cocktails and community in the heart of Albany Park. It opened in 2019, founded by a hospitality veteran and former professional photographer who built the room around a photography theme — bokeh being the name for the soft out-of-focus light behind a subject — and the result is a dim, warm, genuinely local bar rather than a destination one. Food is bar food done properly and priced accordingly: a house nut mix and marinated olives at $7, goat cheese spread, spinach artichoke dip and giardiniera hummus at $12, and a short list of paninis at $16 including an Italian, a roast beef, a turkey club and a vegetarian G.O.A.T., with a grilled cheese at $12. Much of the snack menu is marked vegetarian. It was nominated for Neighbourhood Bar of the Year in the Chicago Tribune's 2025 Readers' Choice food awards.

The non-alcoholic drinks have their own printed heading, "Alcohol-Free Cocktails", and all four are $11 — roughly $3 below the full-proof list rather than at parity. What distinguishes them is that they are built entirely from house syrups, jams and fresh juice rather than from bought-in zero-proof spirits; no Seedlip, Lyre's or Pathfinder appears anywhere on the menu. Watermelon Man combines watermelon juice with mint syrup and lemon. Shinjuku Sweetheart is the most interesting of them, pairing yuzu with soursop and honey. Echo Mist works a chicory syrup with mulberry jam, soda and lemon, which gives it a roasted bitterness closer to an amaro than to a fruit drink. Hi-Potion is a straight alcohol-free build of the bar's own gin-and-vodka cocktail of the same name, made with lime, lemon, salt and mint — a genuine like-for-like rather than a different drink with a shared name. Beyond the cocktails there is a Deschutes Kernza non-alcoholic lager at $7 and Five Corners salted lemonade and sangrita at $5. The menu rotates seasonally; this is the 2026 spring and summer list.