Osito's Tap

Osito's Tap is reached through Moreno's Liquors on South Ridgeway Avenue, the bottle shop the Moreno family has run in Little Village across three generations, and is operated by Mike Moreno Jr. The bar describes itself as a speakeasy-inspired room highlighting craft spirits, beer and cocktails with a modern Latinx flair, drawing on the Bohemian tavern culture that filled this part of the West Side in the early 1900s. Its reputation rests on agave: the program is explicitly educational about tequila and mezcal, and the bar keeps a separate spirits menu alongside the cocktail, michelada and draft lists. Food runs to botanas, entrees and desserts from a kitchen that stays open until 10 or 11pm depending on the night.

The non-alcoholic side of the program is documented by two independent Chicago sources rather than by a published menu, because the bar posts its drinks as images rather than text. Choose Chicago, the city's official destination marketing organization, includes Osito's Tap in its guide to Chicago bars with great mocktails and describes a list that shakes up drinks incorporating classic Mexican flavors and ingredients - the same agave-adjacent vocabulary the rest of the bar works in. Block Club Chicago, listing the bar in its Dry January round-up, described non-alcoholic cocktails made with carrot juice, grapefruit juice, apricot cinnamon syrup and ginger beer. Because the drink names are not published anywhere we could verify, none are listed above; ask at the bar rather than arriving with a specific order in mind. The value of the entry is geographic as much as anything - Little Village is one of the largest Mexican-American neighbourhoods in the United States and had no zero-proof listing in this directory before now, and Osito's is open until midnight midweek and 1am at weekends. The Illinois state tourism site lists the bar as well, and Osito's own site sets out separate cocktail, michelada, wine and draft menus alongside a dedicated spirits list, with the kitchen running botanas, entrees and desserts on its own shorter hours. Anyone visiting for the non-alcoholic drinks specifically should expect them to be made to order rather than picked off a printed list.