When the first cannabis dispensary, bar and restaurant under one roof opened last February near Chicago, it was but a whiff of what was to come. The business was still in bud by patio season despite the big local names behind it. The space became fully lit when a full-service consumption lounge finally opened in late July.
OKAY Cannabis and West Town Bakery in Wheeling is the first and only consumption lounge where you can have your cake balls and smoke cannabis too, all with a focus on craft.
Curiously, you can’t consume cannabis edibles from the dispensary in the lounge. That includes the outstanding chocolate bars by Mindy Segal, the James Beard Award-winning chef and owner of Mindy’s Bakery in Wicker Park.
And you can’t drink alcohol from the bar in the lounge, either. That includes the creative cocktails by beverage director Julieta Campos.
But you can have more than a dozen flavors of colossal cake balls, which do not have cannabis, by chef and partner Christopher Teixeira.
So how does the consumption lounge work?
First, you must be 21 or older to enter the dispensary or the lounge.
“We get a ton of people on their 21st birthday that come in with their parents,” said Scott Weiner, co-owner of OKAY Cannabis dispensaries, West Town Bakery and The Fifty/50 Restaurant Group. “It’s kind of funny, because the 21-year-olds will always pretend like they know a lot less.” Plenty of parents pretend they know less too, he added.
The friendly and patient staff will scan your ID at the door to the dispensary, a modern, colorful and bright Wonka-esque interior space.
If it’s your first time going into a dispensary or you don’t consume a lot or it’s your first time smoking in public, talk to the budtenders, said Weiner.
“Don’t feel like this is something you need to go online and spend all this time trying to understand,” he added. “Give them literally 30 seconds of your time. They’ve been looking for an opportunity to talk about their trade, what they’re passionate about, legally, for years. Like a sommelier loves to talk about wine, they love to talk about cannabis.”
Do note that if you purchase cannabis in the dispensary, you’ll pay by cash or debit, with ATMs on site. You don’t need to buy anything to enter the lounge, but you can’t bring your own cannabis.
And you need a reservation for the consumption lounge, or a host will check you in through OpenTable.
“We’re just trying to make sure that you haven’t been there smoking for four hours,” Weiner said. “Convincing OpenTable to put us on there was no easy feat.”
A staff member will walk you into the expansive connecting lounge. Sofa and table seating have a view of a Starbucks across the driveway and The Westin Chicago North Shore hotel rising high above the parking lot.
They’ll present two menus, one for smoking devices, and the other for food and drink.
“You may want to smoke in a bowl or a bubbler or a bong,” Weiner said. “We have all those different options.”
And you can use them for free in the lounge.
“We have some very expensive and very cool vapes and other smoking devices,” he added. “If you’re really trying to taste the terpenes, similar to what you might find in a wine, you need to consume at the right temperature. We have certain vapes where we can set it to exactly 130 degrees so you can get the exact flavor essence of the IC Collective, all the things that make it so special.”
IC Collective is an heirloom cannabis producer based in Cary.
You can actually order anything from the West Town Bakery menu in the lounge, except alcohol.
“At that point, our job is to just observe and see if we can be helpful,” Weiner said, but not quite like a restaurant experience. “You likely don’t want to be checked in on two minutes after your first hit.”
A reservation is for a maximum of two hours including a 30-minute cool down time.
Tuesdays tend to be the busiest nights, according to the staff when I visited, because of the weekly Baked Bingo, where the prizes include free weed.
So why can’t we consume cannabis edibles in the consumption lounge?
“Oftentimes edibles will take an hour to hit you,” said Weiner, and they don’t want you on the road then. “Or you feel nothing so you take five more and next thing we know, we got you climbing up the side of the walls having a panic attack.”
When I tried Mindy’s cannabis chocolate bars at home, a half piece of the exquisite dark almond toffee didn’t hit me until 90 minutes later, as the Mindy’s Edibles website warns. A mild buzz felt similar to a few sips of wine. The chocolate itself was a lovely chef’s reimagining of a Cadbury Caramello, with crisp dark chocolate around a silky caramel filling.
A whole piece of the caramelized chocolate marshmallow graham bar, however, hit me 45 minutes later and hard. The tiny stamp-size piece clearly exceeded my novice tolerance so much that I was dizzy and stumbling. The chocolate was delightful, though, as an abstract adult s’more.
In the consumption lounge, you can have the bestselling West Town Bakery cake balls. They’re huge and remarkably not too sweet, from the French toast, the most popular flavor in Wheeling, to the encrusted Andes mint, possibly my favorite.
You can also order the Commercial Park breakfast sandwich, with a delicious Co-op hot sauce aioli. And then there’s the Jean Banchet, a prosciutto and fig lunch sandwich, worthy of the late chef who made his restaurant Le Francais down Milwaukee Avenue a dining destination.
You can have the nonalcoholic Nutty Passion or Mr. Nice Guy drinks with an optional Flora Delta 8 infusion. The pistachio flavor of the former is a fan favorite, but I might pass on the benign delta-8 next time. You should probably skip the sliders, which were regrettably dry.
Hopefully, they’ll bring back the Wheelie this summer. That’s their take on the viral circular, stuffed Suprême croissant created by Lafayette Grand Café & Bakery in New York City. It’s still rare in Chicago, but last year only the Wheeling location offered the golden buttery pastry in seasonal flavors, including the beautiful blueberry that I had.
What have become bestsellers at the dispensary to partake in the lounge?
“The craft flower,” said Weiner, and IC Collective is one of their most popular brands. “Our Wheeling location sells more pre-rolls than our Evanston or West Town locations. And why? Because people can smoke there.”
Flower is the dried part of the cannabis plant that’s smoked, like tobacco leaves. Pre-rolls are pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes, commonly called joints.
And what’s that IC flower price?
“It changes based on the batches that come in,” said Weiner, typically between $45 and $60 for an eighth of an ounce. “It’s not the cheapest out there by any means.”
Tax adds to the final price. A Mindy’s cannabis chocolate bar is $24, but $32 with tax.
And speaking of pricey, how do they clean those expensive devices including one priced at $500?
They run some through their high-pressure dishwasher, Weiner said, but others can’t be machine-washed.
“And they have to be hand-washed,” he said. “Believe it or not, the most labor-intensive part of the job is cleaning the smoking devices.”
In a cannabis consumption lounge, there are no laws from the state’s health department that say what they have to have for cleanliness, he added, but there are laws that state your HVAC system must be separated from the rest of your building, and they installed a dedicated outdoor air system.
“It’s basically bringing in up to 6,000 gallons of fresh air from the outside in,” said Weiner, and the challenge in the lounge is actually not how clean the system is, but making sure it’s not too powerful with fans too loud to enjoy the music and ambiance.
“There’s also one other element to it,” he added, with the lounge in the same building as the family-friendly West Town Bakery. “We definitely don’t want people to smell cannabis if they’re not in the consumption lounge.”
“This is new to people,” he said. “You might’ve smoked cannabis seven days a week for the last 10 years. But there’s a very good chance that this is the first time you’ve smoked it publicly. And not in your family room or not in your backyard.”
Or not lost in a crowded concert. Or it’s been years since you smoked and you don’t know your tolerance with a new world of cannabis.
“Most people know how many drinks until they get buzzed,” Weiner said. “You know how many glasses of wine versus bourbon, but not a lot of people know how a vaporizer hits you differently than a pre-roll. And different levels of THC.” With a bottle of wine, he added, you can pretty much assume it’s going to be between 11% and 15% alcohol.
With cannabis, he said, some distillate are as high as 85% to 90% THC.
“There’s flower that comes in between 28% and 30%,” he added. “But then there’s stuff that’s 14%. And it’s not as self-evident.”
Meanwhile, 420 Day is coming up. The unofficial international holiday celebrates cannabis culture annually on April 20. Various origin stories say that the number comes from the time, 4:20 p.m., to start your cannabis consumption.
At the dispensary, bar, restaurant and consumption lounge, Jonathon Sawyer will host a High on the Hog pig roast event. He’s the James Beard Award-winning chef of Kindling, the open-fire restaurant in the building originally known as the Sears Tower.
“This place has a lot of firsts. It’s the first cannabis dispensary with a liquor license and a restaurant in the country,” Weiner said. “It’s also the first and only cannabis consumption lounge in the country with a full kitchen.”
And they’re still the only consumption lounge in Cook County.
It’s a lot of things to a lot of people, he said, but ultimately it’s a part of the community.
“And that’s what we’re really focusing on.”
OKAY Cannabis Dispensary / West Town Bakery
781 N. Milwaukee Ave., Wheeling
847-305-4100
Open: Monday to Thursday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Prices: $56 (IC Collective flower), $24 (Mindy’s cannabis chocolate bars), $14 (Jean Banchet sandwich), $12 (nonalcoholic drinks with Flora Delta 8), $2.50 to $2.95 (cake balls)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on a single level
Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here.
