Five Restaurants, One Downtown: Glenview’s Plan Comes Together

Foxtail at Glenview House opened its doors on August 20, officially completing a five-restaurant plan years in the making for downtown Glenview.

And if Foxtail isn’t on your radar yet, it probably will be soon. The Mediterranean restaurant serves everything from oysters and grilled octopus to lobster dynamite, all inside one of Glenview’s most historic buildings: The Glenview House, where the Village’s original charter was signed in 1899.

But Foxtail’s opening is about more than another place to grab dinner.

In 2023, the Village identified five restaurants it wanted to bring downtown and backed that plan with significant investment. As of this summer, all five are officially open.

For a downtown that spent years surrounded by construction fencing, redevelopment plans and “coming soon” signs, this is HUGE. 

And the timing is especially interesting. This September, Glenview will unveil its second exterior mural, Blocktoberfest returns to Glenview Road, new residents are settling into Cerca, and even more businesses are beginning to take shape downtown.

Individually, they’re separate stories. Together, they give us a pretty good picture of where downtown Glenview stands right now, and where it’s headed next.

The Five-Restaurant Plan

Here's the five restaurant line-up and when each one officially opened its doors.

Jackman & Co. and Zenzi Den both came from Ballyhoo Hospitality, the same group. Ovvio's building used to house Bar Trullo before it changed hands and got a new name. None of this happened by accident. The village put money behind it: a $500,000 grant to help Hometown Coffee & Juice demolish an old industrial building and add parking, and a $1.4 million grant plus a $1.5 million loan to rehab the historic Glen View House for Foxtail. That's real public money aimed at a specific outcome, and five years after the Downtown Strategic Plan was adopted in 2021, the outcome arrived on schedule.

If you've lived here through the construction fencing and the "opening soon" signs that stayed up longer than anyone expected, this is the month you get to stop waiting on that particular list. It's done.

What's Not Finished Yet

A second, smaller wave is still in motion, and it's worth knowing the difference between the two so you're not caught off guard by a "coming soon" sign that's actually further out than it looks.

Smoque BBQ, the Old Irving Park institution that's been featured on the Food Network and in the New York Times since it opened in Chicago in late 2006, is coming to the corner of Waukegan and Grove as its first suburban location ever. Construction on that space is anticipated to begin sometime in 2026, which means it's real but not close.

Spiro's Deli, a Glenview fixture since 1962, is relocating from its longtime spot on Waukegan Road to a new corner at Glenview Road and Lehigh Avenue, with extended hours and the same menu regulars know, including The Bomber and the chicken pita.

And in Colonial Court, two vacant medical offices are being combined into retail space for Edie Boutique and Marigold Gift Shop, approved by the Village Board at its July meeting.

None of these are open yet. If you're planning a night out based on what's actually operating right now, the five-restaurant list above is your accurate map. Everything else is still on the way.

The Mural the County Had to Help Pay For

The same week Foxtail finished the restaurant list, a different kind of project was quietly wrapping up on the other side of downtown. On Monday, September 14, at 4 p.m., the village cuts the ribbon on "Confluence: Life on Glenview's West Fork," an 85-by-15-foot mural by lead artist Anne Farley Gaines, painted on the west-facing wall of the Jimmy John's building in the Shoppers Row development at 1746 Glenview Road. It depicts the Glenview Road bridge, the North Branch of the Chicago River, and native wildlife, the kind of imagery meant to remind residents what the village looked like before any of the restaurants existed.

This is only the second exterior mural Glenview has ever had. The first went up on the Public Works building along East Lake Avenue for the village's 125th anniversary. Getting this second one funded took a $125,000 Cook County Creative Placemaking grant, which Glenview Art League President Deb Anderson applied for in April 2025, and it required more paperwork than you'd expect for a piece of art on a sandwich shop wall. Cook County Commissioner Scott Britton, who'll speak at the ribbon cutting alongside Anderson, Gaines, and Village President Mike Jenny, explained why:

"Doing this in a north suburban community is unusual. It's nice when I can get something done in my district. It's getting harder for artists, with many funding sources going away."

The village that wrote a $1.4 million check to renovate a restaurant needed a county grant and a workaround to get its second-ever mural approved, because it didn't have a mural ordinance on the books until this project forced the issue. That gap between what got funded fast and what took an extra year of grant paperwork tells you something real about where downtown Glenview's priorities have been. The restaurants got infrastructure. The art got a favor from the county.

The event itself will include live music from the Twelve Tone Music School and a scavenger hunt built around elements hidden in the mural, so it's worth bringing kids if you're headed over.

Where the Farm Calendar Doesn't Care About Any of This

None of the downtown timeline touches Wagner Farm, and that's sort of the point. The 18.6-acre working farm on Wagner Road is the last remnant of a much larger property once run by the Wagner family, who arrived in the area from Trier, Germany, in the 1850s. The last surviving family member died in 1997, and the Glenview Park District has kept the place running as a living history museum since. Its fall calendar doesn't shift based on what's happening three miles south:

• Fall wagon rides run Saturdays and Sundays, September 20 through October 31, 10 a.m. to noon, tickets $4 per person on site, weather permitting
• The Glenview Farmers Market continues at the farm on Saturdays through October 24, 8 a.m. to noon
• Fall Harvest Fest runs $5 per person and includes wagon rides, farm activities, and fall arts and crafts
• The Centennial Farm Exhibit, which opened in a grand celebration on February 13, 2026, stays up through the end of the year and traces a century of farming's role in shaping the village

If downtown this September is about finishing something new, Wagner Farm is about a schedule that hasn't needed reinventing. Both are legitimate ways to spend a Saturday here, and they're barely a ten-minute drive apart.

The One Night It All Overlaps

Blocktoberfest returns to Glenview Road on Saturday, September 26, running from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. between Church Street and Pine Street. This year's headliner is Los Lobos, the four-time Grammy-winning band that formed in East Los Angeles in 1973 and hit international stardom with their cover of "La Bamba" in 1987. Two stages will run music through the day and into the evening, including sets from Altered Five Blues Band, Zydeco Voodoo, Nikki O'Neill, and a K-pop dance party to open things at 11 a.m. The Kid Zone runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. with crafts, games, and balloon art, and food and drink are available for purchase throughout, including beer, wine, and hard seltzer.

Friends of Downtown Glenview, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, says it typically draws more than 15,000 people to a downtown that, just two years ago, had several of its now-busiest storefronts sitting empty. Some of this year's crowd will include people who weren't neighbors this time last year. Cerca, the 62-unit apartment building at 1850 Glenview Road with ground-floor retail space, cut its ribbon on June 17 and welcomed its first residents two days later, on June 19. The Bagel has already signed a lease for the ground-floor space downstairs. For anyone who moved in this summer, Blocktoberfest will be their first taste of what the whole street sounds like when it's full.

What September Actually Tells You

Put those three dates side by side and the picture is less about any single restaurant or mural and more about timing. The five-restaurant list the village committed to years ago is finished, closed out by a building with an 1899 charter inside it. The village's second piece of public art, ever, arrives the same week, funded by a county grant it needed help navigating because the infrastructure for that kind of investment lagged years behind the infrastructure for restaurants. And the farm three miles away keeps running a calendar that predates all of it by a century, unbothered by any of the construction fencing downtown.

None of this requires you to do anything. It's just where the neighborhood actually is right now, in the specific five weeks between Labor Day and October, if you're the kind of person who wants to know before you plan your weekend.

If you're curious how any of this downtown momentum is showing up in what homes around Glenview are actually selling for, or you just want a local's honest read on the neighborhood, the Keki Cannon Team is always happy to talk. Let's Connect.