The Paul McGee-Melman boys’ project? It’s a tiki bar, of course.

• Ron Kaplann/LTHForum
• Paul McGee, tiki dervish

You could see it coming a mile away. In the days after Paul McGee announced his impending departure from the Whistler to join R.J. and Jerrod Melman in an unspecified River North cocktail bar, if you casually suggested it might be a tiki bar he’d fall suspiciously silent. But McGee’s frequent tiki nights at the Whistler, which reintroduced and revitalized an unjustly moribund cocktail subgenre for hundreds of happy drinkers, made it a natural, obvious suspicion.