Walk into Plaza del Lago this month and you can buy a Hermès scarf under a restored Spanish Revival tile roof. Walk a short distance west down Wilmette Avenue and you will pass a storefront where a family butcher counter closed for good in January, its longtime owner retiring, while a new cocktail lounge finishes moving into the space next door. Both are accurate snapshots of Wilmette in 2026. Neither one, on its own, tells you what is actually happening to the village.
Most coverage of this year's building boom treats it as one story: Wilmette is getting nicer. That flattens something worth noticing. Two very different bets are being placed at the same time, a few minutes apart, by two very different kinds of owners, and they are pulling the village in opposite directions. One is a national real estate company curating a lakefront fashion destination. The other is a Wilmette resident opening a cocktail bar in the exact spot where a butcher shop ran for more than twenty years, a move that required the Village Board to write a new law just to make it legal.
The Lakefront Is Becoming a Fashion Address
Plaza del Lago has been part of Wilmette since 1928, when it opened as Spanish Court and became, by most accounts, the second-oldest open-air shopping center in the country. It changed hands for $48 million in 2018 after its longtime owner died, and the new owner, WS Development, has spent the years since restoring facades, redoing the parking lots and sidewalks, and rebuilding The Arcade into a proper retail row. According to the Village of Wilmette's own tracking page, that redevelopment has produced 21 signed leases for new retail and restaurant space, a striking number for a single shopping center.
Several tenants are already in place. Lily Pulitzer, James Perse, Jenni Kayne, Veronica Beard, and rag & bone are open, and this year's arrivals have brought the marquee names. Hermès opened its two-level, 8,000-square-foot boutique on August 10, its first Wilmette store and only its second in Illinois after the Oak Street flagship in Chicago, according to Patch's coverage of the opening. The Henry, an all-day restaurant from the hospitality group behind locations across Arizona, California, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, opened June 3, joining longtime tenants Convito Cafe and Burhop's Seafood in the plaza's restaurant lineup, as The Record North Shore reported. Dôen, the Los Angeles lifestyle brand, is set to open its first Midwest store in The Arcade this fall.
Still ahead this year, per the plaza's own tenant roster: Oscar de la Renta and Peter Millar. Jewel Osco, CVS, and Starbucks remain open through all of it, so the plaza is not being emptied out to make room for the new names. It is being layered on top of what was already there.
A Few Minutes West, a Different Bet
Downtown Wilmette Avenue is not part of the WS Development story. It is smaller, older business by business, and the changes happening there are being driven by local owners making their own calls about what the village wants to eat and drink.
Small Cheval, a spinoff of Chicago's Au Cheval, took over the former Depot Nuevo building at 1139 Wilmette Avenue. It is the same family behind locations in Logan Square, Wrigleyville, Fulton Market, Old Town, and The Loop, bringing a Chicago name to a suburban storefront rather than the reverse.
The more telling change is next door. Al's Meat Market, the independent butcher shop that anchored 1165 Wilmette Avenue for more than twenty years, closed in early January as owner Joe Spera retired. The original Al's traces back to the 1960s in Winnetka, so this is the end of a business with roots going back more than sixty years on the North Shore, not just the loss of one storefront. In its place is coming The Mette, a cocktail bar and lounge from Wilmette resident Jason Sander, backed by an investment the lease agreement lists at between $350,000 and $550,000 for the buildout, with rent beginning at a minimum of $5,500 a month, according to reporting from The Record North Shore.
That project could not simply move in and open. Wilmette had no liquor license classification that allowed a business to generate the majority of its sales from alcohol rather than food. Village trustees had to create one, setting a $6,000 fee and requiring that food be prepared on site and offered at all times, according to the minutes of the Judiciary Committee's February meeting. That is not a routine permit. It is the village rewriting its own rulebook because a resident wanted to open a bar in a location where the zoning had never anticipated one.
Why the Split Is the Real Story
Here is the detail that changes how you should read all of this. According to the village's own economic development reporting, downtown Wilmette has very few vacancies overall, and when a storefront does come open, it typically leases again within one to two months. Al's did not close because nobody wanted that corner. It closed because its owner retired, and what replaced it was chosen deliberately by a private owner betting on evening business over daytime butchery.
Put the two projects side by side and the pattern gets clearer. At the lake, a single corporate landlord is assembling a curated, nationally recognized retail row aimed at a shopper who might otherwise drive into Chicago. On Wilmette Avenue, individual owners and residents are making narrower, riskier bets on where people will actually spend a Friday night, bets specific enough that the village had to change its own liquor code to accommodate one of them. One direction is imported. The other is homegrown. Both are reshaping the same few blocks in the same year.
What This Actually Looks Like on a Saturday
If you want to see both versions of the village in a single outing, the loop is manageable. Start at The Henry for coffee, then walk The Arcade to see which of last year's openings you have not stepped inside yet. Hill House Home and Space 519 are worth a slow look. Stop at Convito for something for dinner, then cross to the Jewel or CVS side for the errand you actually came to run. Plaza del Lago also keeps its own seasonal calendar, a summer concert series, an annual art show, a classic car show, sidewalk sales, and carriage rides in the winter, so there is usually something happening beyond the storefronts themselves.
From there, it is a short walk or an even shorter drive into downtown. Lunch or an early dinner at Small Cheval. If you have a memory attached to Al's, this is the block to notice it on, and to see for yourself what has taken its place at 1165. Between the two stops you will have covered a national luxury retailer, a Chicago burger institution, a sixty-year-old family business ending, and a brand-new liquor license category the village had to invent, all within a walk you could do before lunch.
That is the part worth sitting with. Wilmette is not building one new downtown this year. It is building two, in two different registers, funded by two different kinds of owners, and paying attention to both tells you more about where the village is actually headed than reading a press release about either one alone.
If you are watching these shifts because you live here and you are simply curious what your walk looks like six months from now, that curiosity is well placed. If a storefront closing or a new liquor license ever makes you wonder what it means for property values on that block, or what a change like this tends to do to a neighborhood over the following few years, that is exactly the kind of question Amy Garvey is glad to talk through, no pressure and no pitch required. Let's Connect.
