Storefront City Chicago

Sound-Bar

WHAT: Sound-Bar (Nightclub)
WHERE: 226 W. Ontario Ave.

OUR RATING: Skip It!

As part of Storefront City’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, your illustrious hosts ventured out to Sound-Bar, a club featuring dance, electronic and Top 40 music to imbibe some drinks, dance to some beats and have a great time. We’ve been to Sound-Bar before, and so we were pretty excited, as we remembered a multi-level superclub, fully equipped with the most European mixes in Chicago, fantastic lighting design and great bar layouts. Unfortunately, none of these features still exist, and we must relegate this once excellent venue to the dustbin of American trash.

We had been invited to the Pre-New Year’s Eve bash at the club and were very eager to take advantage of this opportunity to let our hair down one last time before the general slog of 2013 began. The entrance to Sound-Bar is through a door accessed by an alley and then up some extremely dangerous cement stairs. Although purportedly an upscale club, this entrance tends to disagree. We arrived at the door just on time and were soon admitted. Normally, admission would cost you $20, and this review will take into account that other customers were paying that much for the same experience. The first thing we noticed about Sound-Bar was the shabby clientele–what on earth happened to these people? Some of them literally looked as if they were plucked from some college frat house after spending a night studying organic chemistry while doing a shot at the end of every problem set. But, once we were over that, we were able to get a few drinks and start the night.

The inside of the club pretty much makes up for the ramshackle entrance, with two levels, multiple spaces and nine bars, all lit beautifully and creating several very unique spaces. Unfortunately, upon our visit this night, the club was only allowing access to the main floor and closed off the downstairs spaces. This left a small lobby-type area, a large great hallway, a side lounge bathed in red with a round bar, and the main dance space.

While the space was naturally beautiful, that night’s lighting designer must have left the building, because the only real moving lights had the saddest geometrical gobo Alicia has ever seen. It was like a screensaver you find on old computers from the ‘90s. Pair that with dreadful fog machine usage and mini dance tables that were only open for use by very drunk women (security threw off all the men, and there were no real dancers to be seen), and the pleasing aesthetic of the space was soon discovered to be overwhelmingly superficial.

Our experience of the drinks (and the bar staff) was decidedly mixed. Of the two drinks Adam tried, a gin and tonic and a whiskey sour, both had glaring problems. The gin and tonic was watery and weak, packing not so much as a hint of that gin that one so desperately craves during the hot months. As an Englishman, Adam concedes that ordering a G&T in winter is rather odd, but we insist that a bar should at least know its ratios when making drinks. Of the whiskey sour, problems were myriad, but the taste much better. While the drink resembled a whiskey sour to a certain extent, it lacked several key features. Firstly, it was clearly prepared with a mix and no shaking was involved. Secondly, a lemon was used instead of an orange slice. And finally, it completely lacked a maraschino cherry. Therefore, it was not a whiskey sour, but some sort of false bastardisation of a sour. Now, you might say that was absolutely fine if it tasted nearly the same, but regular patrons are paying up to $11 a drink for this. Absolutely ridiculous! We can’t imagine anyone paying that kind of money for a false drink. We would expect a club raking in that kind of cash to properly train its bartenders extensively so as to avoid such mistakes in the future.

As for the bar staff themselves, only one seemed competent. She quickly prepared both Adam’s whiskey sour and Alicia’s rum and coke. Other than that, it was a slapstick sideshow all around. At the round bar, both bartenders were incompetent, deserving of little to no tips or appreciation. Perhaps the saddest moment of Alicia’s night was the male bartender’s attempt at a white wine spritzer, which apparently meant trying to mix terrible white wine with…it hurts to say it…sprite. And when she asked for it to be made with club soda instead, she actually received two glasses: one with the diabolical sprite and wine, and one with just club soda. To make matters even worse, he wanted her to pay for both (which she refused and just took the sprite concoction, later to spit out most of its contents). Meanwhile, the female bartender was inefficient, ignoring patrons for upwards of 15 minutes while serving others in quick succession–definitely not a professional attitude.

And then there was the music. Oh dear. Not only could the DJ not make up his mind what or for whom he was trying to play (60s? Dubstep? Michael Jackson? Miley Cyrus?), but there was little to no attempt to transition from song to song, and a few times there was even silence between his failed attempts to pick the right mix.

Perhaps one of the only redeeming features of this place was the bathroom, where we weren’t pestered by the requisite staff offering aggressively to help out (for a price) as we would be in other clubs throughout the city.

But, and let’s get down to it, if the [small and not amazingly well-kempt] bathrooms are the only redeeming features of a venue, it goes without saying that you should NOT go to Sound-Bar as it is simply an expensive, tacky and worthless space. Let’s face it, if you can pay the $20 admission and then the $11 drinks, the $3 coat check and all the tips for every single person along the way, you can probably afford to go to Barcelona or Ibiza for a more enjoyable experience. Skip Sound-Bar, and find an independent underground club with more class and less cost.