Next Wave Awards Bartender of the Year: Katie Renshaw
There’s a confident three-dimensionality to the vibe at Bar Bambi, the sexy cocktail bar in Chicago’s West Town from bartender and first-time owner-operator Katie Renshaw — the sort of intoxicating immersion one probably feels on a film set.
A mishmash of ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s influences mingle with Bauhausian, geometric accents, yielding, conversation pit-style couches, bold houndstooth patterns, and sculptural neon lighting that tints faces pinkish purple then blue. Sneakily molecular drinks bring texture to the fore — bubbles of all shapes and sizes and round, mouth-coating clarification — in friendly, dangerously quaffable guises. It’s the warm kind of world-building that makes a guest want to linger, and maybe order another.
“I have a million concepts in my head, but I think your first bar should feel very authentic to you,” Renshaw says. “So when you’re making creative decisions and business decisions, you have this lighthouse leading you to make the right choices.”
Note the explicit use of “first.” Barely six months into Bambi’s debut, this software developer-turned award-winning bartender makes no secret of her aim to build a hospitality mini-empire. Then again, she’s never been one to keep the goalpost in the same place since she started tending bar a decade ago with the then-distant dream of opening a spot of her own.
Credit: Vlad Levine
Renshaw fell in love with bartending in her early 20s, at a time when Chicago’s craft cocktail renaissance was on giddy display in pioneering bars like the Violet Hour, Sable Kitchen & Bar, and Drumbar. In 2016, she started staging a few nights a week while keeping her day job, including at the understated-cool cocktail bar Moneygun, which she eventually joined full time. Beverage director Dustin Drankiewicz took her under his wing and remained a mentor through Bambi’s opening.
Renshaw relished the creativity, unpredictability, and breathless pace of “stacking tasks” in her brain. Moneygun’s “balls-to-the-wall” volume and focus on classic cocktails provided the ideal foundation and gave her the confidence to pursue bartending competitions. In 2017, she won Speed Rack Midwest and represented Chicago in the finals, then went on to win Bar Artist of the Year in 2018 at the global Art of Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto mixology competition. In 2019, she won U.S. Bartenders Guild’s World Class Bartender of the Year.
“I have zero regrets,” she says. “I met so many people around the country and internationally — built networks I still talk to.”
Renshaw absorbed invaluable lessons at every job on the road to Bambi: How to create cocktails and what fine-dining-level hospitality looks like at Michelin-starred GreenRiver in Streeterville; how to manage a bar program at Etta; what stability can look like as brand ambassador for St‑Germain liqueur — and when it’s time to get uncomfortable again.
She was still with St‑Germain a few years ago while attending her favorite event of Tales of the Cocktail: Letters to a Young Bartender, in which experienced bartenders read letters to their younger selves.
“Their journeys hit home with me, like, ‘What am I doing? I’ve lost the thread,’” she recalls. “I need to get back to doing what I love and building toward the thing I love.”
Credit: Vlad Levine
So she joined the opening team at posh London steakhouse Hawksmoor’s Chicago outpost and reacquainted herself with her brand of bartending: precise, inventive, and technique-driven but not flashy. When a space became available in West Town last summer, she and her business partner and investor jumped at it. She tapped her community for advice, including bartending pal Jeremy Owen Barrett (whom she got to know behind the stick at GreenRiver) and the team at Chicago bar darling Lemon. “My experience with the Chicago bartending community is very much that we lift each other up and show up for each other,” she says.
She kept an ear to her gut, too. She hired skilled bartenders whose energy she felt resonated with the Bambi vision, and ended up with a diverse staff who imbued the space with a genuine kind of welcoming. She handpicked chef Nicklus Byrns of Michelin-starred Elske, whose fine-dining pedigree shows itself in the way he magics humble bar snacks into slightly indecent, edible art. Think deviled “naughty eggs” with confit garlic and spiky Calabrian chilies and an airily battered filet-o-halibut sandwich smeared with pickle-y sauce and sticky American cheese.
She built a cocktail menu that highlights her singular style: tinkering with molecular mixology behind the scenes then packaging the results into something texturally fascinating and irresistibly drinkable.
Take the bestselling Three Decibel Rule, which looks like a sleek Dirty Martini and tastes like a vegetal cross between a Vesper and Lychee Martini, thanks to lychee cordial and agar-clarified bell pepper, Cocchi Americano, and crème fraîche-washed vodka for a lactic tang.
Credit: Vlad Levine
The carbonated section sports startling textural range, from fine, tiny bubbles in the Skinny Dip, a boozy “cream” soda with rum, bianco vermouth, Thai banana syrup, and clarified cream, to the fat, punchy carbonation of the Collins-like Repeat Offender, with gin, Campari, and apricot liqueur, perfumed with tonka bean and jasmine.
So why call it Bambi? It’s a cheeky nod to the tall, cat-eyed Renshaw’s moniker in her 20s, when she had a penchant for sky-high heels and drinking enough cocktails that she resembled a stumbling, new fawn. It’s a tender confessional from someone for whom it now seems the sky’s the limit.
The sensory feast part is obvious, like the oft-brashly suggestive art on the walls. (Go find the superhero-esque thonged butts in the bathroom if you haven’t already.) But the quiet details speak just as loudly: the eye contact and genial banter, the felt coasters beneath every drink, and place settings with every snack.
When asked what her own Letter to a Young Bartender might say now, Renshaw seems briefly rattled before the words start to flow as if from a tap, about embracing the dirty hands and long, late nights of it all.
“What you do every day in the bar is what you sign up for and why you love it,” she shares. “If you’re having a bad day, or something is going on in life that’s taking away from your spark or happiness, remember you’ll get that back from the guest. They’ll rebuild you.”
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