Drinks Over Dearborn Meets "Benjamins" Goal

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Mar 1, 2010 3:00PM

Two weeks ago Drinks Over Dearborn owner Kyle McHugh, facing the closure of his River North liquor store, unable to pay his vendors and receive a small business loan to float him until his books were in the black, announced an ambitious plan to raise funds to keep the store open long enough for his projected profits to start to show. The "500 Benjamins or Bust" campaign was created to raise the necessary funds for McHugh to pay off his creditors, but only if DoD was able to find 500 customers to open $100 accounts with the store. If McHugh couldn't reach that goal, DoD would close its doors March 5.

We were pleased to see that McHugh was over half of the way to the goal when we visited DoD last week to buy a bottle of Le Baladin Nora. McHugh planned a 24-hour fundraising webcast Saturday with the intention of meeting the goal.

Turned out he only needed 12 hours. By 5:30 a.m. Sunday McHugh had reached his $50,000 goal, which gave him time to grab some sleep and re-open the store for business yesterday.