The Aviary

The Aviary is The Alinea Group's cocktail bar at 955 W Fulton Market in the West Loop, the drinks counterpart to Grant Achatz's Michelin-starred restaurants, and it does not operate like a bar in any ordinary sense. There is no standing at a rail and no ordering off a list on arrival: guests book a seated experience through Tock and are served a progression of drinks the way a tasting menu is served, from a three-course cocktail progression up to a five-course Aviary Experience and a seven-course Kitchen Table Experience. Drinks arrive with purpose-built vessels, ice engineered for a specific dilution rate, and techniques borrowed from a pastry kitchen rather than a bar. It is the sort of place where the mechanism of the drink is part of the point, and it has shaped how ambitious bars around the world present cocktails.

For a non-drinker the important fact is short and unusually generous: every experience on the menu is available in a non-alcoholic version. Not a substitute drink, not one zero-proof option tucked at the end of the list — the entire progression, at whatever length you book, can be built without alcohol. That means a non-drinker gets the same number of courses, the same theatre and the same seat as everyone else at the table, which almost nowhere at this level offers. The group's commitment to this is not incidental either: Achatz and his team published ZERO: A New Approach to Non-Alcoholic Drinks, a roughly 250-page book of nearly a hundred non-alcoholic recipes developed in these kitchens, which remains one of the most serious references in the field. Two practical caveats. The Aviary does not publish the contents of its non-alcoholic progressions in advance — the drinks change constantly and no fixed list exists to check — so you are booking the format rather than choosing specific drinks. And because everything is prepaid and seated, this is a planned evening rather than a walk-in, and worth flagging your preference at booking so the bar can build the progression accordingly.