No TVs, No Problem: Hindsight Community Tavern Opens on Irving Park With Table Games and CBD Cocktails
By Socialhood News · North Center ·
North Center's Irving Park Road corridor just got its newest gathering spot — and it's deliberately, cheerfully unplugged. Hindsight Community Tavern, a place for patrons to catch up over CBD cocktails and three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, opened Wednesday in North Center. It is exactly the kind of unhurried, community-first bar concept the neighborhood tends to embrace.
Located in the old Prost Florist shop at 2020 W. Irving Park Road, Hindsight will specialize in low-tech table games like chess, Connect Four, Mancala, and puzzles. The choice of space is fitting — a flower shop transformed into a neighborhood tavern, the kind of adaptive reuse that gives Irving Park Road its layered, lived-in character. And if the absence of flat-screen TVs strikes you as a bold move, owner Ryan Reynolds will tell you that's entirely the point. "I want people to pour each other soju and play four-person Mancala," Reynolds said.
"We wanted to have something for everyone," Reynolds said. "Our goal is to be as inclusive as possible." That philosophy shows up in the physical design of the bar as much as the programming. The bar's countertop was custom-made and features a wheelchair-accessible spot; embedded in the countertop are pieces of old beer and liquor bottles that Reynolds saved from house parties and nearby dive bars. It's a detail that manages to be both practical and deeply personal — a bar built literally from the neighborhood's own history.
The conversion didn't happen overnight. Reynolds spent about a year converting the old flower shop into a tavern, and hired a mason who built an arch behind the bar. That kind of deliberate, craft-focused buildout tends to signal a serious operator — someone betting on the long game in a neighborhood rather than rushing to a quick opening.
On the drinks side, Hindsight is staking out genuinely distinctive territory. The tavern will offer beers, wines, classic cocktails, mocktails, and CBD-infused drinks, and will also sell cup ramen and other light snacks. Hindsight's opening cocktail menu includes the "Wizard's Highball," made with absinthe, saffron, and grapefruit, and an affogato martini — an espresso vodka martini topped with a scoop of ice cream. All of the cocktails can be made without alcohol. That last detail — a full menu available alcohol-free — makes Hindsight genuinely accessible to sober and sober-curious neighbors, a hospitality choice that remains relatively rare even as the category grows.
The Irving Park Road address puts Hindsight squarely in a stretch of North Center that has been seeing steady new investment. Earlier this year, a building permit was issued for The Irving, a five-story mixed-use development at 2035 W. Irving Park Road just a few doors down, signaling continued builder and operator confidence in the corridor. Hindsight's arrival adds a social anchor to that momentum — a place designed not just to serve drinks, but to slow people down and get them talking to each other.
Reynolds has kept in touch with a lot of Raven Room regulars who are excited to come to Hindsight — suggesting the new tavern is already arriving with a built-in community of neighbors ready to make it their new regular. For a bar explicitly designed around the idea of connection, that kind of anticipation is a good omen.
Hindsight Community Tavern is open now at 2020 W. Irving Park Road in North Center. Stop in, pick up a game of Mancala, and let a stranger pour you some soju — that appears to be the entire philosophy, and it's hard to argue with it.
Sources:
1. https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/10/20/at-hindsight-community-tavern-in-north-center-cocktails-and-table-games-on-the-menu/