3 Dots & A Dash – Chicago, IL

Most of you know D.Rough and I have a deep love for tiki drinks – think rum and fruit juice on a Polynesian island. We’ve tried to find a way to get to Chicago’s 3 Dots & A Dash for a few years now. We finally made it happen!

A lot of tiki-lovers have issue with this place because it’s loud and expensive, but we didn’t care. We saw a few comments that said you should get a reservation if at all possible, so we did long ahead of time. Even so, we could only get a spot at 10:30pm, which was fine by us. 

It has a sort of speakeasy feel, with an entrance in an alley (although, it’s pretty well marked once you’re in the alley), and a dark staircase into the basement (once you get past the bouncer). If you don’t have reservations, be prepared to stand outside in a line about 200 people long waiting to get a standing spot near the bar – just letting you know. 

When you walk down the staircase, you’re facing a beautiful glowing wall of skulls, which is sort of a signature feature in the place. Very tasteful and fun, in my opinion. There’s a spot to stand near the hostess stand where we waited a couple of minutes for our table to be made ready. Everyone is so nice here!

As I said, if you don’t have a reservation, you don’t get a table. GET A RESERVATION. There is a long row of 4-person tables in the middle of the dining room and then larger booths and spaces for parties along the walls of the dining room. It’s very well decorated and definitely has a relatively authentic (but upscale) tiki feel to it. Yes, it IS loud, but it’s a combo of both music and talking energy, which we thought was enjoyable. Sorry, old people, it isn’t a quiet 1960’s Polynesian basement den with calming ukulele sounds in the background! The server we had was pretty fantastic and went through the layout of the impressive menu. Single person drinks on these pages, multi-person drinks on these pages, ridiculously expensive drinks (like $400 or served in a pirate ship with a full bottle of rum) on these pages, specific fancy sipping rums on these pages, food on these pages, and merchandise on these other pages.

D.Rough and I had intended to keep it tame and have one or two single-person drinks. That was the PLAN. Every drink on this menu sounds amazing, however. But we started tame. D.Rough got an Aloha Felicia and I got a Fat Bottom Mermaid. 

These drinks showed up VERY quickly, which was amazing. (Note: a lot of the drinks are made in the back of the house, since the bartenders serving non-reservation people can’t keep up with the crazy demand of the tables, so you won’t get to see your drink being made, if that’s your thing.) Both of these drinks seemed to be tailor-made to our tastes. Mine was rum and crazy fruit juices, and D.Rough’s was rum and crazy coconut and other juices. Completely different tasting drinks and we loved both of them. In fact, they were some of the best tiki drinks we’ve ever had.  They’re probably pricy for drinks at a tiki bar in say Omaha, but in Chicago, this is how much drinks cost – deal with it.

The night was going well. We were happy with our drinks, with our server, with the random people talking to us as they walked past, and with our entire situation. We looked at the single-person drinks, and then a little deeper into the menu and decided that since we were here and it was sort of a special destination for us, that we should possibly take advantage of the circumstance and get something special. We literally wanted every drink on the multi-person drink pages, but we finally decided on the Bali Bali – rum, Armagnac, gin, and various juices – but for 4-5 people. Also, the picture on the menu sold it, as well. 

It arrived just as fast as the other drinks, but it was bubbling and glowing and “smoking” all over the place from the dry ice. People from around the bar literally came over to our table to take photos and video of it – really one of the most impressive drinks I’ve ever had. AND, it was D-LISH-OUS! Sure we were getting a little crazy with our ordering, but we felt like this was worth it, even for the presentation alone – not to mention the taste was way better than we expected.

We polished that drink off and thought we had better order some food, since we didn’t appear to be slowing down. We ordered the Lanai Luau Chips. These seemed like they might soak up some booze! They’re like vegetable pork rinds (which I’m sure just horrified a bunch of my vegetarian friends), served with a delicious mango guacamole. There were more of them than I thought there would be, but we definitely finished them off. Really tasty snacks.

We weren’t sure the chips were going to be enough so we ordered the Thai Fried Chicken…. and then some more drinks. I got the Saturn & Negroni and D.Rough got the Idle Hands Do The Devil’s Work. Again, these drinks were perfectly suited to our regular drinking tastes, except they were monumentally better than what we normally drink. The Saturn & Negroni is gin, homemade orgeat, and tropical juices and the Idle Hands is like a classic non-blended daiquiri, but with banana rum. Both were killer. And the Thai Fried Chicken was much better than we thought it was going to be. Great fry on the outside of these chicken pieces and just a tiny bit of spice in the wonderful glaze that was on them. We’re really glad we got these! 

Somehow, I talked D.Rough into getting another drink with dry ice in it – I’m sure I’m SUPER smooth and convincing when I’ve had eleventeen drinks. So I ordered the Shotstopus. 

It’s basically shots of 151 rum and juices but served on an awesome octopus display with dry ice. D.Rough was ready to be done when it came out, so I basically drank both shots (slowly, so I could actually taste how amazing they were). And they were awesome, in case you were wondering.

At this point, I was feeling on top of the world. SO much so that I spoke German with our server – who was originally from Germany. Fact: I don’t speak German. (To be fair, I took German in college for a bit, but that was a hundred years ago and I’ve lost it all…until I get a “few” drinks in me”)

Thankfully, D.Rough talked me out of ordering any more delicious drinks. She’s the brains AND the looks of this operation. She asked if this is a regular occurrence when I find tiki bars with my friends while I travel around the country for roller derby tournaments. (She’s an actual athlete that takes care of her body while the rest of us schlubbs regularly request late check-out of hotels and eat Advil like M&Ms after tiki nights.) So I suppose I’m more “in practice” than she is. That being said, no one was surprised when I woke up the next morning in our hotel room (thankfully) fully clothed and cradling the TV remote like it tried to get away from me during the night. Worth it. Worth every penny of the most expensive tiki night we’ve ever had. So much fun!!! 

And then the following morning, D.Rough and I continued the tiki fest by putting fun tiki garnishes in the copious amounts of water that we needed to drink!

You will be amused to find out where we went for lunch the next day on our way out of town…… hahahaha

www.threedotschicago.com