The Polo Inn

The Polo Inn occupies a red-brick storefront at the corner of 33rd and Morgan in Bridgeport, a Chicago neighbourhood with a long civic history — the inn's largest guest suite is named for the neighbourhood's mayors, and a vintage campaign poster still hangs on its wall. Dave Samber opened the address as a candy shop in 1985, turned it into a café five years later, and still runs the kitchen and the guest suites above it himself.

The address does three things at once, on different clocks: a scratch kitchen that has fed Bridgeport for four decades, a small run of themed guest suites on the two floors above it, and a banquet hall built into a 1914 cinema next door that also hosts a Sunday gospel brunch and a jazz night twice a month. Guests staying over get the quiet version of all three — breakfast downstairs before the dining room opens to the public, and a walk to Sox games that most visitors drive to.

The rooms

The suites fill a 1914 brownstone walk-up above the café — the Mayors' Suite, the Sox Suite and the 11th Ward among them — each with its own private bath, a couple of them cast-iron claw-foot tubs, and beds enough for four to six guests travelling together. The decor leans Victorian and heavily themed rather than neutral hotel-modern: dark wood four-poster beds, brass chandeliers, deep green drapery, the odd piece of civic memorabilia on the wall.

Breakfast is cooked to order downstairs in the Polo Café dining room, the same room that serves scratch-kitchen dinners built around Certified Angus Beef steaks, fresh seafood and the desserts — crème brûlée, a flourless chocolate espresso torte, gelato — the kitchen is best known for locally. Overnight guests get a discount on lunch and dinner there, along with free lighted parking and a shuttle that runs to the train, McCormick Place and the United Center when it's available.

The setting

The inn sits a mile west of Guaranteed Rate Field, where the White Sox play, and a few miles from Soldier Field, McCormick Place and Mercy Hospital. Bridgeport still carries the look of a working Chicago corner — brick two-flats and storefronts along Morgan Street, with the inn's own green sidewalk café marking its address from a block away.

The inn's other fixtures are as local as the address: a fish fry on the third Friday of every month, a Sunday gospel brunch with a theatre organ played live, and a jazz and blues night twice a month in the banquet hall next door. The kitchen spent 21 years cooking at the Taste of Chicago, the city's big summer food festival, which is as good a measure as any of how the Samber family is regarded outside Bridgeport as well as in it.

Who it suits

This suits visitors who want a real neighbourhood over a hotel district — Sox fans in for a game, wedding guests staying on after a reception next door, or anyone who would rather sleep above a four-decade-old kitchen than in a chain hotel near the airport. The suites are themed and old-fashioned rather than styled to a design magazine — four-posters, brass, deep colour — which will suit a traveller after character more than one after a minimalist finish. Groups and families fit more naturally than solo travellers, since the suites are built to sleep several guests at once.