With Best Intentions, Marble's Replacement Opens in Logan Square

The marbles are gone but the charm remains. Best Intentions, the renovated and renamed former quirky neighborhood tavern Marble, has quietly opened on Armitage in Logan Square under new owners and longtime local cocktailers Calvin and Christopher Marty, who kept the opening on the down low. With it comes some fancy cocktails and some new looks, but the homage to a Chicago neighborhood bar with cheap drinking options is still in tact.

The new buildout includes a few changes to the facade and the interior design, including moving and expanding the main bar to the east wall. Much of the inside is an homage to a classic Chicago bar, including a menu board with pricing that's reminiscent of the one at Richard's in River West. There's still a jukebox and a couple of video games in the smaller room/dancefloor in back, and the massive and comfortable rear patio is still there but with an upgraded second bar.

One thing that's still in development is the new food program, as Best Intentions hasn't started serving its upgraded food menu yet. Expect that soon, but for now they've brought in food carts to serve grub in addition to some bar snacks. The Torta Doggs cart was there on one recent night, for example.

Like the opening itself, the Martys are keeping most menu specifics under wraps, although cocktails and many canned beers, of both the craft and cheap varieties, are available. Their vaunted boozy milkshake the "Wondermint Malted" is on the menu, although the machine is currently undergoing repairs. Some cocktails and house-made ginger beer are still dispensed from soda guns. The back patio bar served frozen drinks ($10), summery twists on classics such as a steelcut horchata margarita ($9), rose ($6-8), and canned beer ($2-8) on a recent evening.

The main menus are housed in books, which you can check out in two photos below. Best Intentions should be one of the better recent additions to the local bar scene.