BYOB · read from the licence record 2026-08-29
554 rooms with no licence to pour
Chicago licenses a room to serve drink separately from licensing it to serve food. So a room that may seat and feed people and holds no licence to pour is one you carry your own bottle into. The city never publishes this list, because it is not a record. It is the absence of one.
A candidate list, on the same terms as what the city is building. Nothing here lights anything: a venue may charge corkage, may refuse, or may have changed since the record was written.
Finding their pages
A licence record carries no website, so the same sweep that works the late-hour list works this one. It guessed a domain from each name, tried 836 of them, and found 66 pages that are really the room rather than a company with the same word. 12 print enough to be worth opening.
A low hit rate is the finding, not a failure. A room like this is small and often has no website at all, or lives entirely inside a delivery app, which is a page we cannot re-fetch and therefore cannot publish from. And a page that mentions bringing your own bottle is usually a customer saying so in a review the venue reprinted, which is a claim about a claim. Only a room that says it in its own voice is carried here.
Read out on 2026-08-29: three of the 12 say it in their own voice and are carried. The rest print a menu and their hours, or a free item once you spend enough, which is a threshold and not an hour. One prints a weekend buffet with a real window and puts it on neither location's menu, so it is not established which room runs it or what it costs.
How this is derived
Two queries against one record. Every active licence to seat and feed people, and every active licence to pour a drink on the premises. A room in the first and not the second is a room you bring a bottle to. Addresses are matched across ranges and floors, because the city writes 1132-1134 W GRAND AVE 1ST on one licence and 1132 W GRAND AVE on the other, and a bar that looked like a BYOB would be the worst thing this page could print.
A name that pours anywhere in the city is excluded too, not only a name that pours at this door. That loses a few honest rooms to a shared name and is the safer way to be wrong.
Where they are
Counted per plate. A room on a plate that borders another is counted on both, because it is on both.
What this is not
Not a claim that any of these welcomes a bottle, and not a claim about corkage. It is a claim about what the city has on file, which is the only thing a record can tell you. 49 of them are a franchise counter or a members' room, counted and set aside rather than deleted, because deleting them would make the total a number we had edited.
Read from the city licence record on 2026-08-29. A room reaches the clock the way every other source does: a person reads its own page and finds hours to bound it. If you know one of these takes a bottle, send the source.