Andersonville bar Nobody’s Darling caters to queer women

CHICAGO — Off the overwhelmed path of Northalsted, the place homosexual bars line North Halsted Street, in an in any other case quiet residential stretch of Andersonville, two Black lesbians have opened a bar with a poetic objective.

Angela Barnes, the co-owner of “Nobody’s Darling” on Balmoral Street, mentioned she got here throughout an Alice Walker poem with started with the road, “Be nobody’s darling. Be an outcast.”

The line captured the defiant and various spirit of the social space Barnes and Renauda Riddle wished to create.

“People, when they come in here, they feel like they don’t have to be anyone’s darling they can be themselves or whoever they want to be that day,” Riddle mentioned.

The two are business companions — not romantic companions. They met on the Center on Halsted and bonded over a love of golf and cocktails.  

They additionally agreed that there was a necessity in Chicago for an evening spot that catered to queer women.

“We decided, regardless, we wanted to have women-centered spaces. This was going to be a woman-forward, women-centered – very intentional about not saying lesbian, not because there’s something wrong with saying it, but because we wanted to be more inclusive,” Barnes mentioned.

The two opened Nobody’s Darling in May 2021, bucking a nationwide pattern that has seen almost all lesbian-friendly bars shut. According to the Lesbian Bar Project, 40 years in the past, there have been 200 lesbian bars throughout the nation. Today, there are solely 21 left.  

“The historical need to have those spaces isn’t as acute, right? there are other spaces for us to be in,” Barnes mentioned. “I think there could be economic reasons. It’s hard to sustain a bar where it is primarily just lesbian women.”

In a metropolis serrated by race, class, geography and gender, they wished a bar that would welcome everybody. 

“There’s no sort of homogenous group of people. people are very different. They’re sitting next to each other and then they’re talking to each other, and for us that’s amazing,” Barnes mentioned.

“When you walk in here you will see some of everyone — class-wise, sex-wise, ethnicity-wise, all different colors of the spectrum are here having conversations they may have not had before with each other,” Riddle mentioned.

Yet they’ve grow to be service business superstars in a single day. This month they have been named finalists for the James Beard Award for “Outstanding Bar Program” which is the best honor in for cocktails and culinary creations within the nation.  

“It was shocking, it was humbling and it really made us dig in as to why us? Of course it’s the cocktails first, but it’s also the culture,” Barnes mentioned.

The bar makes a speciality of hand-crafted artistic cocktails such because the Kahlo Margarita.

For a couple of hours, on summer season evening, the residential road of Balmoral Avenue is full of laughter and love — echoes of the bar’s poetic objective: Be no person’s darling, and be happy with who you might be.