On creating a space to gather

How did you both get into bartending?

Greg Diemond: It was back in Chicago. My buddy Ben was a bartender for a long time. It looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing at the time—me and my buddy were managing a pizza and Italian beef spot downtown. Flexible schedule, you know, and having fun while you’re working. So I staged with him at Prosecco for a while, and then ended up getting a job bartending at Citizen Bar, which is long gone. I started there on door, then bar back. I really worked my way up. I worked everything there except for running the place.

Diana Orena: I was working for a law firm at the time and my friends and I were regulars at a bar on Bedford called Blackbird. The owner really liked us, so he decided to let me and my best friend Cassie guest bartend one night, and we never left. I quit my law firm job because I was having so much fun. And then I went on to other bars, then Skinny Dennis for nine years, and Lucky Jack’s. Then I met Greg and opened up this spot.

Greg: I bartended right down the street at Extra Fancy.

Diana: We would go to each other’s shifts.

Greg: One of the partners at Extra Fancy had this space when it was a burrito spot, and he was looking to unload it. Me and Diana were like, “Hey, I think we could make a bar in there.” So we took it off his hands.

Diana: We had no idea what we were doing… Everything was brand new. It was scary, but it was fun.

What was the learning process like?

Greg: We did have some mentorship from one of the partners at Extra Fancy, one of our really good friends, Mark. He helped us with the layout and design. We knew what we wanted to do and he helped us execute it. You know, talk to a carpenter… He really helped bring our ideas into play and put us in touch with different upholstery people, purveyors, and stuff like that.

Diana: We mirrored this bar after our favorite dive bars and meshed them all together. Some of our favorite spots in Chicago and Pennsylvania, Detroit, all around the Midwest. We picked what we liked about certain places and tried to put that all into a design of a place.

Greg: Wood paneling. Formica tables—you see those a lot in Detroit.

Diana: The soffit came from a bar in Pennsylvania that I fell in love with.

Greg: The soffit hangs over the bar. The Old Style sign, we got that from a bar that was closed in Chicago. We took it apart and made four signs out of it. That ended up being a pretty big part of the design for the place. It was a major project to put it in the ceiling, and to get it out of the original bar that it was at. We went there with my little Hyundai Santa Fe thinking, “We got this.” We went to my friend’s brother’s house, grabbed his ladder. I was leaning a huge ladder against a tin roof, and I started to try to take down the sign. My buddy’s down below holding the ladder and he’s like, “Hey, I just realized my best friend does this for a living. He’s a sign guy.” So he sent a picture and his buddy was like, “Tell him to get the fuck off that ladder, I’m coming over.” So he came over with a crane. It was December.

December in Chicago, no less. I love the bar signs everywhere—the mirrors, the bouncing Miller Light, the “wax on wax off” neon.

Greg: We went hard on those. We picked little things that we liked throughout bars in the Midwest.

Diana: That’s a super fun part, sourcing all that stuff. Finding some guy in New Jersey and picking up the sign and realizing he has a whole warehouse and being like, “Hi, can we please go in there?”

I truly love signs. It’s one of my favorite things about Chicago.

Diana: They’re so special. And you can have them hanging [outside] in Chicago. Here, it’s a whole nightmare. You can’t really have hanging signs unless it’s grandfathered in. All the signs in Chicago that are still old neons and stuff—you don’t see those around here.

What do you think about the way that the design of an interior dictates how a place feels?

Greg: I think it does for sure. Right down to the colors of lights that you put in.

Diana: The lighting is number one. You’ve all been to super lit bars… I can’t stay there for that long. It just feels cold. The music’s low and the lights are up. It’s like, do you want me in here?

So everything is hyper-intentional?

Greg: Down to the height of the booths and all that. Obviously, we didn’t have a lot of space to work with, so every half-inch mattered.

Diana: And that’s why there are lulls in the bar. Spaces. If we were to put a chair there, it would block people from going to the backyard—there’d be pinch points.

Greg: You need the inches behind the bar, half inches behind the bar… Working with limited space like that is chaotic. Tough.

There’s something so specific about a bar: how it looks, who comes, and the way that people interact there. Honore in particular has a significant cohort of regulars who form this micro-community. Theo and I made a map a few years ago and it came out to, like, 70 people.

Greg: We talk about it all the time. What’s awesome is how many friendships, and bands, and projects, and jobs, and softball teams were born out of this space. All we did was make its four walls, and that’s all you can do. The rest is everybody else. That makes the bar what it is. Watching that develop over the years, it’s so beautiful. It’s rad. That’s my favorite part.

Did you have any kind of intention to foster community?

Greg: We just wanted to make a bar that we would love to hang out in. A vibe and atmosphere that is fun and inviting.

Diana: I think a lot of it has to do with our staff. It’s who you hire.

So many people who work here and who come here are like musically inclined. Bands form here. There are Honore-specific shows.

Greg: It might have something to do with the practice spaces being right there. We are, like, a block away from the practice spaces, so people come in with their guitars on their back. They want a beer after the practice, and then that starts snowballing. Half our staff plays in bands.

You’re romantic partners as well as business partners. How do you manage that?

Diana: For the first four or five years, we worked [the bar] every Saturday night. It’s fun as hell. We don’t do it a lot anymore.

Greg: It’s fun if it randomly happens. Like, if someone gets off, Diana will cover.

Diana: But to keep it healthy, we both do different jobs completely. I’m more financial, insurance, all that stuff. And he is ordering and fixing and all of that.

Greg: She talks to the accountant, the CPA, the insurance people, all that boring stuff. And I’m more bar stuff.

Did you figure that out right away?

Greg: Right when we were first doing the buildout, Diana immediately just took over that part. I was working until 5 A.M. on the Lower East Side and then coming here at 8, and she opened up my brain so I could just do this. She took care of the paperwork and all that. And then it stayed that way ever since. But we obviously do payroll and stuff together.

What are the most valuable resources that you have, as bar owners?

Greg: The community. Other bar owners and bartenders are a super valuable source. If a pipe breaks at midnight and you don’t want to get screwed over, who’s a really reliable person that can fix this? We’ve been in positions where you get an emergency plumber in, and they don’t fix it and they’re dinging you out for thousands of dollars. That’s one of my big ones: the other people in your business, the business community. What about you?

Diana: I was gonna say a good accountant. [*laughs*] Having a list of people that you can trust to do work, because the thing about bars is something is always broken. Something will break.

Do you remember that crazy storm in 2021? Knickerbocker was flooded. There was, like, a lake between the yard door and the stairs because the drain was clogged. Water started flooding into the bar. Part of the ceiling fell down. Maybe 10, 15 minutes later, Bronson and Dave were here with a ladder, unplugging stuff so there wouldn’t be a fire. Smolko was out in the yard with my umbrella and a broom unplugging the drain. How does a community like that form so that you’re able to call on someone to help you?

Greg: More than any other business I’ve ever worked in, there’s a lot of trust in who you have as your bartender, because that person is also the manager on duty. As a bartender, you’re the only one there. Sometimes it goes south, and you gotta figure it out. Having someone you really trust and you know is not gonna be blackout drunk when a problem happens at 2 in the morning—that’s huge. Over the years working with people like that, you find those qualities and people like, “Yeah, that’s exactly the person I want behind my bar.” Everybody here fits that.

Last week, the door handle broke on the bathroom and you had a caravan of people wanting to help. Like, “Hey, I think if you do this…” and “I’ll run to Ace.” Just incredible to watch.

Greg: I can’t count how many times something’s broken and the homie sitting at the bar is a professional in that field. Our walk-in’s down or our ice machine’s down, and James, he’s on it. I don’t know that that can be said for so many other industries.

Returning to this kind of philosophy of interiors, I want to ask about the aura of the space. I know there were a bunch of businesses in this spot before you that didn’t last even a year.

Greg: The amount of people that told us that this place was cursed…

Diana: “You’re doomed.” “Don’t even bother.” “I give it a year.” All that. And then opening up [in 2018] and then COVID. We’re like, “Oh…” But we defied the odds. I think COVID really is what—unfortunately or fortunately—put us on the map. It gave us an opportunity to meet the whole neighborhood because we put the frozen machine in the front door and had [our late Bernese Mountain Dog] Bo here for it.

Greg: A lot of the kids in their 20s didn’t even think that this was a bar they were allowed to come into. They thought it was like a VFW or Allegiance Hall or something.

Diana: We were making hot dogs and serving frozen drinks out the front door. Perfect opportunity to meet everybody, you know? We had been open for a year, but people that walked by every single day were like, “I didn’t know you guys were a bar.”

Greg: That was before people were even allowed in the bar, so they couldn’t even come in to use the restroom. I remember people being like, “Oh my god, soon we’re gonna be allowed to go in the yard.” Everyone was so excited to see the space.

It’s an almost hidden storefront, in a very Chicago way. You have to know where you’re going. And there’s something about the space, the vibe in here, that means you can basically be assured no one’s gonna bother you.

Diana: We don’t even—knock on wood—need security. We have all of our regulars here. In the rare occasion that something does happen, we’re all ready to defend. It’s the importance of community. I met Amanda Dayon here, one of my closest friends when she passed away, but she was also everyone’s good friend here. Absolutely there’s that sense of community. I wanted to be here more because Amanda was here, but everyone felt the same thing. This was our spot, everyone’s spot, meeting spot. That’s the one thing I’m most grateful for. Neighbors, friends, regulars, everyone totally make this place what it is. Otherwise, we would just be a bar.