There’s something about 5pm on a weekday that feels like it deserves marking properly. Not a big occasion, just a good one. The right seat, the right drink, the right company and an hour that belongs entirely to you before the evening takes over.
Hawksmoor Chicago sits inside the historic LaSalle Street Cable Car Powerhouse in the heart of River North — the kind of space that makes showing up feel like an event, even when you’re just stopping in for one. Pull up a seat at the bar, order a drink, or maybe even a steak or a burger, and let the city do its thing outside. You can rejoin it whenever you’re ready.
Every day, 5–6pm. Hawksmoor Chicago, River North. Steak frites for $25, Notorious B.E.E.F for $21 and cocktails for $13 or less.
A great happy hour lives or dies by the drinks. In a city that takes its bars as seriously as its restaurants, we weren’t about to serve anything less than the real thing.
Think martinis made the way they should be — cold, precise and non-negotiable on the details. Classics done properly. Wine worth drinking. A broad selection of everything you actually want at 5pm, all $12 or under. Pull up a seat at the bar and let the evening figure itself out from there.
Chicago knows steak. So, if there’s steak on a happy hour menu, we’re certainly not cutting corners with it.
Ours brings together dry-aged beef, cooked over live fire, with crisp golden beef-fat fries and the kind of sauce you end up mopping the plate with. It is simple, deeply satisfying and exactly what you want when the day has been long, and dinner needs to do some heavy lifting. At $25, it is also — and we say this with complete sincerity — one of the best decisions you’ll make all week.
Two dry-aged patties, special sauce, New School American cheese and enough homemade pickles to make eating gracefully essentially impossible. It started as a burger. It became something of a situation. Word got round, as it tends to with things this good, and now it’s the kind of order that arrives at the table and makes the whole restaurant look over.
Come hungry. Bring napkins. Possibly order another drink.
