The Name Behind Half of Downtown Naperville's New Restaurants This Summer

A 35-year-old bread shop on Gartner Road closed earlier this month without a new tenant lined up. A few months earlier, downtown, a steakhouse in a former seafood restaurant's shell started serving a 42-ounce tomahawk with a butter candle that melts onto the tablecloth. Two endings, one loud, one quiet, both part of the same Naperville story this summer, and most people are only noticing the loud one.

If you have walked Washington Street lately, you have probably clocked the new signage. What you may not have clocked is who keeps putting it up.

What actually opened this summer

Here is the stretch of downtown that has changed hands since spring, address by address.

Each of those is a real business decision with a name attached to it. Lola's owner Mayra Serna, who already runs locations in Lisle and Yorkville, is waiting on inspections before she opens the churro counter on Jefferson. Bonci owner Chakib Touhami, bringing the Roman-style pizza chain that started in Rome and expanded to Chicago in 2017, was aiming for an Aug. 14 opening or the Friday after, which puts the debut any day now. Cantina Taco Grill's Jose Oliver, who already runs Taco Grill and Salsa Bar in Westmont, has said he has wanted a downtown Naperville spot for 15 years.

That is a genuinely full pipeline. It is also not the interesting part.

The name that keeps showing up

Look again at two of those rows. The Belmont, at 35 S. Washington. The George, at 245 S. Washington. Both belong to Empire Restaurant Group, the hospitality company run by Will Cullen and Dave Miller. So does Empire Burgers + Brew at 48 W. Chicago Ave., the group's first Naperville concept, which opened back in 2016. So does Northcott Liquorette, a few doors down at 40 W. Chicago Ave. Add Fiamme to that roster and you have one operator holding down five concepts on two of downtown's busiest corners.

That is not incidental. When Cullen talked about The Belmont taking over the old Catch 35 space, he described the equipment and layout as already suited to a steakhouse, telling a local reporter the kitchen "bones were here" and that the front of house was gutted to build something new inside a familiar shell. The George went further: Cullen and Miller worked with the Naperville Historical Society to name the restaurant and its menu items after real figures from the city's past, including former 20-year mayor George Pradel, who was also the city's 13th police officer, a detail now stamped into the bun of the restaurant's signature Badge 13 Burger.

So the story people are telling this summer, that downtown Naperville is having a restaurant renaissance, is true. But the renaissance has a concentrated ownership structure. If you eat at The Belmont on a Friday and then celebrate a birthday at The George the next month, you are patronizing the same company twice without necessarily knowing it. That matters if you care who is shaping downtown's identity, because a handful of operators making coordinated bets on adjacent corners is a different kind of downtown than a dozen independent owners taking scattered chances.

What didn't come back

The flip side of that concentration shows up in what closed and stayed closed. Elegante Salon & Day Spa, at 15 S. Naper Blvd., shut its doors for good with a last day of July 25 after more than 50 years in business. The owners gave no public reason, and the stylists have since relocated to a different salon. Great Harvest Bread Co., at 192 W. Gartner Road, closed a couple of weeks later after more than 35 years, not for lack of trying to sell the business but because the landlord chose not to renew the lease.

Neither space has an announced replacement yet. Compare that to the speed with which Front Street Cantina's old spot on Jefferson already has a named successor with a target opening date, or the way Eddie Bauer's storefront turned into Vuori almost as soon as it emptied. Restaurant and retail concepts are filling downtown's ground floor faster than legacy service businesses are finding their next chapter. That is a texture of the neighborhood worth knowing if you are the kind of resident who has been getting your hair cut at the same place for two decades. The map you memorized is not the map that exists right now.

Timing it before the patio season closes

None of this is static, and downtown Naperville's calendar gives you a natural deadline to see it for yourself. The stretch from mid-August through Labor Day weekend is typically the best patio-and-stroll window of the year, the kind of evening light that makes a walk down the Riverwalk worth doing on its own. Last Fling, the Jaycees-run festival that closes out the summer, lands September 4-7 this year, and it tends to be the moment downtown gets its biggest single crowd of the season. If you want a table at The Belmont before then, reservations are already running through Tock, and the restaurant's own description leans into an unhurried, martini-and-dry-aged-beef pace that does not favor walk-ins on a festival weekend.

If you are more the golf-simulator type than the tomahawk-steak type, the new business energy is not confined to the four core blocks either. Back Nine Golf, a 24/7 membership-based simulator lounge, is aiming for an October opening at 1271 Rickert Drive, a sign that Naperville's business churn this year is not purely a downtown phenomenon even if downtown is where most of the attention has landed.

Walk Washington and Jefferson this week and you will see the obvious story: new awnings, new menus, a churro counter that has not opened yet, a taco shop with a target date still about four weeks out. The less obvious story is who owns the awnings, and which fifty-year-old storefronts are sitting empty while the newer ones fill in fast. Both are true. Only one of them shows up if you just count the restaurants.

If you are watching downtown Naperville for reasons that go beyond dinner plans, whether that is a future move, a sale, or just keeping tabs on a neighborhood you care about, the Wardlow Group tracks this kind of block-by-block change as part of how we work these suburbs every day. Reach out any time you want a local read on what a stretch of storefronts like this actually means for the block around it.