Diala Grocery & Liquor

I love this little place. It’s near where I live, it’s pretty well-​stocked for a tiny store, it always smells like the best incense and the owners/​employees are really friendly. Since it’s right on the corner for me, I sometimes satisfy snack attacks here, too, because they carry chips and ice cream, among other items. But really, I love that their beers are fairly inexpensive and they have a nice variety of wines and spirits, too. There is a $ 5 minimum, I think, if you are using credit, but I think most shoppers usually meet that pretty easily.

Helpful staff and pretty good pricing.

This store is small but mighty, just like me. It has your convenience store basics like batteries, asprin, ice cream bars and Tootsie Rolls but it also carries a great selection of wines, craft beers and spirits. While traditionally a liquor store, its got some decent offerings of snacks and sundries too.
The gentlemen here are very friendly and the prices are really good for their product lines. Around the holidays, they have tons of gift sets that are priced the same as the single bottles and they often have wineries in doing samples. Store is very clean and there is free parking. Score.

If you live west of Andersonville Wines and Spirits at Foster/​Clark, and you feel lazy to drive and/​or trek east to there, you could do much worse than hitting this place up. Liquor selection obviously isn’t as much as what you can find at Andersonville Wines/​Spirits, but it’s still not bad, as I noticed Delirium Tremens, La Fin Du Monde (sp?), and Hoegaarden (sp?) were in stock. They had a decent variety of wine, and not surprisingly, plenty of variety and stock of 6-​packs, 12 packs, etc.
No cigars here (unlike Andersonville Wines/​Spirits), but they do have a limited amount of snack food, regular food, and non-​alcoholic drinks (i.e. soda). And though I wouldn’t ever buy cigarettes within either Chicago or Cook County, it’s one of the very few places in the city where I’ve seen Lucky Strike cigarettes sold at. So it definitely earns at least one cool point in my book. In addition, it’s extremely easy to park, as it’s on the western end of a strip mall that’s now usually deserted, with the recent closing of Foster Avenue Bleach.
Though Andersonville Wines and Spirits remains my first nearby choice for liquor (along with the Jewel by Clark/​Bryn Mawr), if I’m making not too expensive of a liquor purchase (as the new city liquor tax has made me permanently decide to purchase more expensive liquor in the suburbs), I’d definitely consider this as a solid second choice. And especially if Andersonville Wines and Spirits ever ran out of any liquor I wanted to get!