The Best Strip Clubs in Chicago

The first thing to know about Chicago's strip clubs is that several of the famous ones are not in Chicago. City licensing has long been restrictive, so the largest rooms sit in surrounding towns — Bridgeview, Ford Heights — while the city itself holds a smaller number of long-running venues. Guides tend to gloss over this. We name the town each venue is actually in.

The order below is ranked on how consistently each club is named, its scale and its location. Five is where the evidence stops, and that is lower than most Chicago lists for a specific reason given at the bottom: several clubs those lists still rank no longer exist.

Admiral Theatre is first. It is on West Lawrence Avenue, inside the city, it is the one venue named by both sources we compared, and it is the Chicago Reader's pick for the city's best. Its own copy calls it Chicagoland's largest adult nightclub. If you are going to one club in Chicago, go here.

Rick's Cabaret on North Kingsbury is the downtown option and the easiest to reach without a car — it is the closest thing Chicago has to a big-brand club in the centre. Deja Vu Showgirls on South Clinton is the other city-limits room, and the pick if you want somewhere less polished.

Polekatz is in Bridgeview, out past Midway, and is the largest of the suburban rooms. Atlantis is further out still, on Lincoln Highway in Ford Heights, and is the one to know if full nudity and a late licence are the point — city venues cannot offer the same combination.

Every address above was read off the venue's own website. Polekatz publishes no street address on its site, so none appears above — it names Bridgeview and nothing more precise, and a gap is better than a guess. The suburban two are drives, not walks; the three city clubs are not close to each other either.

Chicago guides still rank clubs that have gone. Pink Monkey, Heavenly Bodies and VIP's are all missing here because their web addresses no longer belong to them — two now serve foreign-language gambling and link-farm pages, and one serves an advertising placeholder. VIP's is ranked second, and Pink Monkey is a runner-up for the city's best club, in the sources we compared. Neither is a club you can visit.

Scores Chicago is also absent, for a different reason worth stating precisely: its website refuses our requests rather than being gone. We could not verify it either way, so we have not listed it and we are not claiming it has closed.