Vaudeville and burlesque meet top 40s dance club at this River North nightclub.
Smokey Hollow
343 W. Erie St. 312-624-9902
Rating: !!! (out of four) Off to a good start
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The vibe: Modern dance club meets cabaret
Price point: Bottle service and moderately priced cocktails
Go for: A dose of top 40s dancing with a pause for live entertainment of the vaudeville, burlesque and dance crew variety
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and witness a spectacle you’ve never seen before. At least, maybe not in a club. Smokey Hollow is bringing theater to River North’s nightlife outfit. Depending on who you talk to, there’s already plenty of theater to be found in clubs, but this one touts something more than go-go dancers on a platform. Think circus performers lying on a bed of nails or stapling lit-up Christmas lights to themselves.
You know, “a reason to go out,” said club operations director Ben Foreman.
“We never want to be like every other nightclub, where you walk in, do bottle service and stand around and stare at everyone,” he said. “We wanted a theater aspect with live entertainment every night—dance crews, burlesque, circus [performers]. … We kind of just want to add an experience to going out.”
Tucked away in the old Board Room space off the main club drag, Smokey Hollow—borrowing a nickname for industrialized River North, when it was a much grittier and unsavory place to hang out—is a laid-back joint with all the ingredients of a nightclub and more to look at.
The scene: Cabaret-style nightlife entertainment isn’t new to the neighborhood with options like loungey, sophisticated Untitled and cocktail-driven The Drifter, but Smokey Hollow caters to the true clubbing crowd, disrupting the standard bottle service dance club expectation. It’s a narrow space for a nightclub, which gives it a modern cabaret vibe with exposed brick, sleek stone tables surrounded by lounge seating and a red velvet curtain shielding the stage that runs nearly the entire length of the left side of the room. Rows of round dressing room-like bulbs span the ceiling and light the back of the stage when the curtain is open. However, a DJ booth in the center of the room and a column in the middle of the stage partially obstruct performances, making it necessary to walk around to either side of the stage to see the entire show. Maybe two performers on either side are better than one.
The club doesn’t currently charge cover or require a dress code, which can create a stuffy environment. The way Foreman sees it, “You only have one time to impress someone,” and the Smokey Hollow crowd is a laid-back group filled with 20-somethings in both jeans and dress pants. Unlike other club atmospheres, there’s not a huge emphasis on controlling the gender ratio to accommodate male viewers. “Every bar will tell you that they’d love to be more female-oriented than male-oriented, but the gist of it is, we’re just happy to be accommodating. We want to address everybody coming in,” Foreman said. Besides, everyone is a viewer when all eyes are toward the stage.
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The performances: With a supply of unusual performers, the show themes vary each night. Thursday is vaudeville and shock entertainment, with magicians, hula-hoopers and contortionists, as well as performers stepping on glass or “doing things to hurt themselves,” Foreman said. Friday features burlesque, and Saturday is more party-oriented, bringing in performers such as ballerinas, a Pearl Jam cover band and a Michael Jackson impersonator. On the three nights I visited, the acts came out about every half-hour and performed for 10 minutes or so. While the burlesque, contortionist and hip-hop crew were all good, I wanted more variety in the evening, rather than the same act each time.
Overall, the club seeks out an assortment of acts, from weird tricks to fancy footwork, but more performers means more excitement is built up throughout the night. Between sets, DJs pump a mix of pop, hip-hop and Top 40s, but don’t mistake it for another crazy nightclub. Foreman said he wanted to offer the neighborhood a different venue that gives guests something to look forward to. “Throughout the night, we want to give [guests] an added element of entertainment, and it’s not just dancing or shaking your tush, it’s meant to stop the music and allow them to be entertained,” Foreman said.
Bottle service or bar service? Bottle service isn’t everyone’s bag, and it typically defines beer and cocktail folk from nightclubbers. But Smokey Hollow is welcoming of both, with bottles ranging from $300 to $1,200 for spirits, as well as classic cocktails, such as whiskey sours and old fashioneds ($16). When bottle service-centric clubs were a novel thing to the city, that was part of the concept experience. But Foreman, whose resume includes Studio Paris, American Junkie and other River North clubs, said that there’s been a shift with the younger generation, and it excludes those coming into the club scene who either haven’t grasped it or don’t have the spending power. But bottle service isn’t the main pull of Smokey Hollow. “If [guests] want bottle service, great, we have that. If they want to sit down and just have a drink, have a drink,” Foreman said. “We want to accommodate people and get back to what true customer service really was, knowing our customers’ names, having them come in and enjoy a concept.”
The bottom line: Novelties were truly novel during the cabaret era, and while we can’t quite recreate that today, we can appreciate the art form. Smokey Hollow does that where it’s unexpected, in club-driven River North. For those who want to get their dance on someplace outside of the hipster bar crowd, Smokey Hollow is pretty ideal. It shows off Chicago’s weird and wonderful nightlife performers in a scene where most nightclub entertainment relies on the DJ, adding a fresh layer of entertainment that can appeal to those who aren’t otherwise interested in clubbing. It’s got all the stuff of a nightclub—the flashing lights, the bottle service girls—but with more spectacle, glass-eaters and ballerinas included.
Reporters visit bars unannounced, and drinks are paid for by RedEye. For more eat & drink news, click here.