Our Story
Despite opening in Spring 2026, Hindsight Community Tavern has existed in some form or another for years and years and years. As the name implies, we are carrying on the community-driven spirit of Redline VR/The Raven Room, with the benefit of, well, hindsight.
Our little burrow here has been is made for you, specifically. It is a place for you to toast with an N/A beer, a THC cocktail, and a hard seltzer. It is a place to talk to neighbors you’ve lived next to for years but never gotten to know. It is a place where your birthday party is our Thursday night, your LLC launch party our Friday, your first date our Saturday, and your wedding cocktail hour our Saturday a few years later.
We are a small team, tightly knit, and all looking forward to getting to know you and the people who trust you enough to drag them to your favorite neighborhood spot. And we are proud to say that because we are a small team, we pay our staff competitively including health benefits, as well as offering them a share of the tavern’s profits. Nobody supporting this community should need a second, or third, job.
Our Beverage Program
Our beverage program is inspired by the variety that makes our city’s food scene among the best in the world. Cultures from around the world have found homes in Chicago, and their cuisines have come with them, filling our streets with delicious flavors and making our GrubHub read like a Model UN.
Our cocktails strive to be playful and invite some curiosity, but to still deliver on quality in the interest of fostering of a fun night with friends. You’ll find eclectic flavors, esoteric ingredients, and favorite tastes in novel combinations, all alongside drinks as comforting and familiar as that spot in the couch that fits your ass perfectly.
And while we strive to serve tasty and fun drinks, everything we serve at Hindsight Community Tavern is meant to support our community and inclusivity goals. Yes, we will offer alcoholic craft cocktails, but alongside those, as full and equal portions of the menu, you will also find hemp, caffeinated, and non-alcoholic beverages as well.
Aside from this being a savvy move to court market trends and the declining rates of drinking amongst Gen Z and Millenials, blah blah blah, we all have non-drinking friends who deserve third-space community spaces where they don’t feel pressured to drink, or othered when they don’t.
Our Community
The heart of Hindsight Community Tavern is the people who fill it, so we want to make sure that once you’re in here and settled, we’re doing all we can to make sure the few hours you spend with us is, if nothing else, fun! We host a whole host of weekly and one-off events, from Magic: The Gathering nights, to chess tournaments, to sketchbook nights and beyond. You can find our full calendar here.
But, and not to sound like an infomercial, that’s not all. We expect, and hope, for these events to change, morph, and evolve based on what the community wants, which is why, if you’re reading this now and have an idea for an event, we’d love for you to contact us! What y’all wanna do is what we wanna do, yeah? Let’s make it happen, cap’n.
Our Table Games
What’s a tavern without games? Currently, Hindsight Community Tavern stocks an array of table game offerings and, with community guidance and over time, we plan to curate a big collection of joyful offerings. We’ve got perennial favorites like chess and connect 4, but we also stock some lesser-known classics too (check out Hnefatafl!).
We’re not against electronic offerings, and in fact there’s a really cool infinite TicTacToe we highly recommend getting way too intense with your friends about, but kind of to the point, there’s no TVs here. It’s a community, right? We like it best when everyone’s facing each other, and that when folks argue, it’s over pieces on a board.
Our Owner
Hi! I’m Ryan, and seriously, thank you. It means a lot that you care enough about what we’re trying to do here that you’ve read my ramblings about what Hindsight is and what we want to turn it into. I’m a lifelong Chicago Northsider, and I spent the beginning of my 30s managing Redline VR/The Raven Room, so these kinds of spaces are special to me. If you’d visited before, you’ll see a lot of their DNA in Hindsight. If you didn’t get the chance to go, let me give you an idea of the vibe.
Redline VR and The Raven Room were truly unique spaces in the Chicago nightlife scene. I loved the creative freedom that was afforded to the staff, myself included, and the overall eclectic vibe we were able to create together. And for what it’s worth, we were offering THC cocktails there before any other bars even had canned hemp.
It was the kind of place where an indoor disc golf league could rub shoulders with a Magic: the Gathering community, all while a drag open mic was happening in the background. We boasted the largest D&D community in the city, as well as a 200-person skeeball league. We got to produce and host a tremendously popular BeetleJuice pop-up. We got the city’s best artisans to gather for art and craft fairs. Local directors approached us to run theater productions. We played host to DJs, pro wrestling events, and even a filmed comedy special. I could go on, and if you ever catch me behind the bar at Hindsight, I might. In short, it was crazy and often felt overwhelming, but we had plural tremendous communities that I got to work with to help funnel their desires into the space.
Hindsight Community Tavern is maybe what you’d call a spin-off project. I want to take all the things I loved about that crazy place, focus on them, and make it (a lot) smaller.
I couldn’t be more thrilled at the prospect of seeing my old regulars again while also meeting new regulars-to-be. See you soon!