Why Downtown Glencoe Restaurants Are Thriving in 2026

Daniel Rakestraw was fifteen when he started washing dishes at Guildhall, the American bistro on Vernon Avenue that's anchored downtown Glencoe for years. Nine years later, he owns his own restaurant two blocks away. RDK Sushi opened at 317 Park Avenue this April, and Rakestraw didn't leave town to build it. He left, learned from a Nobu rooftop sushi bar, and came back.

That homecoming is worth paying attention to, because it explains something about downtown Glencoe that a simple list of new restaurant openings won't. Within the past year, two new kitchens opened a few blocks apart downtown. One is thriving on a street that has quietly become one of the toughest addresses in the North Shore to keep a lease. The other is filling a storefront that's been a graveyard for restaurant concepts since 2013. What separates them isn't the menu. It's whether the business had a story before it had a lease.

The Address That Can't Keep a Tenant

If you've eaten downtown in the last decade, you've probably watched 667 Vernon Avenue change hands more than once without quite registering the pattern. Village trustees laid it out plainly when they approved Elyon's liquor license last fall: the space has cycled through Dewey's (which took over from Vernon's in 2013), Cibo Trattoria, District, and Valor before Merlo's Italian gave it a shot, opening in February 2024 and closing just fourteen months later, in April 2025.

Six concepts, one address, twelve years. Meanwhile Guildhall, sitting at 694 Vernon just up the block, has kept the same address across that same stretch, including through the pandemic, without a single gap in the storefront.

That contrast is the actual story downtown this year, and it's easy to miss if you only notice the new sign in the window.

Two New Kitchens, Two Different Kinds of Roots

RDK Sushi didn't drop into a vacant storefront from nowhere. It moved into 317 Park Avenue, the space that housed Meg's Cafe for years before Meg's closed in May 2025. Rakestraw bought the building's other tenant, An Apple A Day Catering, from longtime owner Barbara Lepman that August, and the catering operation still runs out of the same kitchen today. Regulars who'd ordered party platters from that address for years didn't lose it. They gained a sushi counter next to it.

Rakestraw has said as much himself, describing why he thinks Glencoe will back a hometown restaurant the way it hasn't always backed an outside concept:

"everybody knows everybody and they know if you are from Glencoe, if you're from the North Shore"

That's a different kind of credibility than Elyon brought to 667 Vernon. Chef Ozgur Ozkan wasn't a Glencoe kid. He runs Elia in Wicker Park and lives in Wilmette, and he picked the Vernon Avenue space through a friend's tip, not a childhood connection. What he brought instead was a concept that had already worked somewhere else: a chef-driven Mediterranean and Turkish tasting menu, the same format that's kept Elia busy in the city for years.

Neither restaurant is gambling on an unproven idea in an unproven space. RDK Sushi had a built-in kitchen, a built-in customer base through the catering business, and an owner whose name half the neighborhood already knew from Guildhall's back-of-house. Elyon had a chef who'd already spent years working out the format elsewhere and simply ported it north. The concepts that failed at 667 Vernon over the past twelve years didn't have either kind of anchor. They were new ideas in a location with no memory attached to them, which may be exactly why the address has struggled to hold anyone.

The Rest of the Summer Downtown

The restaurant turnover isn't happening in isolation. It's playing out against a downtown that's been busier than usual on Friday nights.

Writers Theatre, the Jeanne Gang-designed building that opened on Tudor Court in February 2016, joined the Village and the Glencoe Public Library this year for select Friday-night installments of Glencoe Al Fresco. The series brought food trucks and live bands to WLC Park, the small green space next to the theater, with happy hour specials running at the Writers Theatre Bar on those evenings. It's the kind of low-key civic event that doesn't make headlines outside the village newsletter but fills the same two blocks that RDK Sushi and Elyon are competing for foot traffic in.

Later this month, Glencoe's Esplanade is scheduled to host another one of its sunset concerts on August 17, a continuation of the same summer live-music calendar that's kept residents outside after dinner rather than driving elsewhere for entertainment.

And downtown isn't the only place investing in its own kitchen this year. Glencoe Golf Club, the public 18-hole course established in 1921, brought on Open Kitchens as its restaurant provider for a new two-year run, with a new clubhouse and restaurant set to debut this summer overlooking the course. It's a different kind of dining decision than what's happening on Vernon Avenue, made by a public course board rather than an independent chef, but it points to the same underlying pattern: the institutions doing well in Glencoe right now are the ones building on something that already existed, whether that's a historic clubhouse, a theater's civic mission, or a catering kitchen that never closed.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this is really about restaurants. Glencoe's downtown is two compact blocks along Vernon and Park, walkable enough that everyone notices when a storefront goes dark and everyone notices again when it reopens. In a village that size, a single address changing hands six times in a decade isn't background noise. It's a pattern residents can watch play out from the sidewalk, the way you'd track a neighbor's renovation.

What the pattern actually shows is that the businesses succeeding downtown right now aren't the ones with the flashiest concept. They're the ones that arrived with a story attached, whether that's a kid who grew up three blocks away or a chef who'd already spent years perfecting the same menu somewhere else. The village's two most reliable draws, Guildhall and Writers Theatre, both built their reputations over a decade rather than a single season. RDK Sushi and Elyon are betting on the same long game, just from different starting points.

If you've lived here a while, you already know which storefronts feel permanent and which ones you've stopped getting attached to. That instinct, it turns out, tracks pretty closely with which addresses actually make it.

If Glencoe's next chapter, downtown or otherwise, has you thinking about your own address in the village, the Wexler Gault Group has spent years watching these blocks change and knows the North Shore market the way a longtime resident knows which restaurant will still be there next year. Get a Complimentary Home Consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's next.